Author: Scott (Page 31 of 80)
This is the second week of training using the FIRST program. So far, I like the feeling FIRST gives you of not having to run seemingly every day. But man, there really isn’t any space for relaxing when you are running. Every one of these is a real workout.
I’m a little behind the schedule due to being sick in the first week, but there really isn’t a way to skip workouts in this program. I’m running every other day until I’m back on the schedule, which should happen next week.
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Wednesday
Key Run #1: 13 minute warm-up, 6 x (1 minute fast then 2 min. easy), 13 minute cool-down
Thursday
Mountain bike
Friday
Key Run #2: 2 miles easy, 2 miles @ 8:15-8:30 pace, 2 miles easy
Saturday
Rest, light swim
Sunday
Key Run #3: 9 miles @ 9:15 pace
Monday
Cycle: recovery
The Facebook IPO wasn’t “botched”.
It was a timed effort to extract as much money as it could from the market before the market realized Facebook’s business model is full of holes.
And it was still a year and a half too late in my opinion.
Dear citizens media of the United States,
Michael Phelps doesn’t owe you a damn thing. He doesn’t owe you/us/anybody another gold medal or an explanation about “what happened”. Stop using words like “disaster” and “disappointing” to describe anything he does or doesn’t do at the Olympics.
Ditto for every other athlete competing there in every other sport.
Ditto for every other athlete competing at any other level.
I swim, but I’m not really a swimmer. My longest workouts of an 18 week triathlon training plan are about what real swimmers–even the ones who are a long way from being Olympic athletes-do as a warmup before their main set. And I go about half their speed.
And they do this daily.
At 4:00 am.
And again at 4:00 pm.
For years.
With no real off-season.
What these athletes do is nothing like the trip to the gym that most of us take to “work out”. They aren’t chatting with friends between sets, listening to a 10 song playlist and calling it quits, or watching “Saved By The Bell” reruns on the screen of the cross trainer while they work to the point of almost sweating. I’ve had swimmers who weren’t even D1 level tell me their stories about swimming through their teammates’ vomit floating on the surface of the pool and having their goggles fill with tears from the pain they were suffering during training.
During the cycling road race, I heard one of the commentators mention an East German training tactic of putting a cyclist on the trainer in front of a concrete wall and having them ride for hours looking at nothing, just to build mental toughness. How mentally tough do you have to be to spend all your training staring at a black line on the bottom of a pool?
So, in closing, get off the guy’s ass. He’s been staring at the bottom of a pool for 20 years. So what if he wanted to coast into this Olympics with (relatively) little training and just enjoy the experience of being there and have some fun? He’s done this long enough to know he’ll get what he earned, and that’s something he has to come to terms with on his own (*UPDATE* Coach Vance points this out better than I did after Phelps’ post-race interview). He’s smart enough to know that he isn’t going to be the best in the world for the next 300 years either.
He doesn’t have to answer to anyone but himself.
The second we see swimmers jump into the pool and splash around like idiots instead of actually trying to win a race, it will be time to complain. Until then, anyone who is “disappointed” when watching (from their sofas or broadcast chairs) any of these athletes’ performances should hit the off button, get up , and go do something about it themselves.
Rinse and repeat for NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA sports, and all little league competition.
</rant>
I’m sure I’m not alone in receiving those emails with ‘FW:” in the subject line. That’s why I continue to lose interest in Facebook. It has increasingly become a place where many people post everything from the ‘net they deem neat.
I remember telling someone 4 or 5 years ago how Facebook was so great because it wasn’t all spammy like MySpace. That and, “your mom isn’t on there”. Guess where your mom is now? And feel lucky if people are posting the forwards on Facebook instead of continuing to email them. My prediction is that it’s about to get a lot worse…wait and see what Facebook’s earnings are today. Now that they’re beholden to shareholders, something’s going to have to be done to increase their revenues.
There will be ads. Lots of ads. Right along-side all that useless content.
Invest a week into really using Plus. I mean really using it. It doesn’t disappoint.
Well…unless you want them to open up the API. Tick tock.
Who would have ever thought I’d wake up with a cold the day of my first training run?
I was very tempted to go out and try to run anyway because I really don’t want to start a program that way, but I thought better of it. I’ve actually tried that before, and I did not have a speedy recovery. I generally don’t go back and pick up missed runs in a training program because they are so small in the big picture. However, I’m trying a three day a week program for this race, and I think I’d be better off skipping one of the cross training days and making sure I get my runs in. I’ll just push the long run out a little further and I can be back on my planned schedule within a week.
Then again, the run I missed was an interval workout. Maybe I could skip it…just this once.
The name of any good fair food must be a compound word:
- Turkey leg
- Funnel cake
- Cotton candy
- Corn dog
- Snow cone
Cool medals too!
I decided on a fall marathon to try to fix what ailed me in the Florida 70.3 run. Luckily there’s a great local race, The Space Coast Marathon, over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Using the FIRST training plan, I hope to keep up with my swimming and cycling as best I can on the cross training days, and once the race is over I’ll get back to cycling heavily and put the run into a mostly-coast mode to get ready for the Naples HITS 70.3 in January. We have local open water swims every Wednesday, and the course is set up nicely to get a 1.2 miles swim in safely. The real trick is going to be getting some distance in on the bike, so I may have to work overtime a little to make that happen.
Here’s this week’s schedule
Monday
Cycle: Probably a Spinervals Aero Base Builder
Tuesday
Key Run #1: 10 minute warm-up, 6 x (1 minute fast then 3 min. easy), 10 minute cool-down
Wednesday
Open water swim
Thursday
Key Run #2: 2 miles easy, 2 miles @ 8:15-8:30 pace, 2 miles easy
Friday
Rest
Saturday
Key Run #3: 8 miles @ 9:30 pace
Sunday
Cycle: High intensity spin or another Spinervals video
What if a team didn’t let their GC contender dope, but doped their #2 rider and let him pull the top rider through the tour? Then when the #2 rider ended up getting disqualified, you still keep the GC crown.
Why not juice up an ox to pull the cart over all those mountains, sacrificing the ox and eating him at the finish line?
Not saying any team is employing that strategy this year…just saying.
Given: It’s not working hard or being smart that allows you to build a business and create jobs. When I say “create jobs”, what I’m really saying is “create taxpayers who fund government programs that allow roads and bridges to be built/maintained and pay teachers”. What actually allowed you to build that business was your access to education (great teachers), roads, and bridges. Fair enough…let’s run with that.
Logical Conclusion: Since everyone in this country has equal access to public education, roads, and bridges, we should penalize (tax) people who don’t create jobs (taxpayers). Since they aren’t fully utilizing the resources government has provided to them by creating more taxpayers or at least paying in themselves, they aren’t doing their fair share for society.
I guess you could say that not everyone had great teachers, and that’s not their fault. So should we further penalize those not-great teachers for denying these people their opportunities to get out on the roads and bridges and make something happen for the rest of us?
I’m not sure I like the logical end to this argument.
What if, when the zombies do come, they attack and eat robots instead of people? That way, all of the robots that have cost people their jobs will be either eaten by zombies or too busy fighting the zombies to produce anything, freeing up those positions for people to go back to work doing robot tasks?
Robots will still be helping us, because they’ll be keeping the zombies in check.
Not any more outlandish than any of the other zombie scenarios you can come up with.
HT Instapundit.
Lots of people have ditched cable and satellite in the last few years and are using Netflix/Hulu/Amazon to meet their home entertainment needs.
But that won’t cut it for the Olympics.
If he took a notion to, a man could make a quick buck or two installing directional antennas on the roofs of these people for $50-$75 a pop. A man who knows what he’s doing could easily use the web to find the right antenna for each address, buy them off the web
Check out new Blackfoot Gypsies video. Like Butters on a wet seal.
Yesterday I had one of my least favorite types of run…The Bonk. Does anyone enjoy a bonk? Adding insult to injury, it was short-distance bonk–only four miles. I should be able to negative split that every day.
But not yesterday.
With about 1.25 miles to go, that ol’ familiar feeling crept in. I knew I was not only going to have trouble knocking a minute off my current pace in the last mile, I was going to have trouble holding my current pace. It happens to everybody, and it’s part of running. When this happens to me, I try to make the best of it. I try to occupy my mind with thinking about all the ways this run is going to help me on race day. I have a little conversation with myself. It’s a very repetitive conversation, because I’m basically repeating the same thing over and over:
“Yes, this hurts. Ok, we’ve established that. Isn’t this what you expect to feel like on race day? Isn’t this the exact position you want to put yourself into with a mile to go? The only difference is that you want to be going faster. That’s the only factor that makes this situation different than race day. This is an opportunity to practice, and you can’t create this opportunity when you choose. You have to seize these rare opportunities when they come along.”
At the wall, but winning the Clydesdale division and setting a PR. This is what I trained for. I bonked a 10 miler the day before this race. September 11 Memorial 5k, 2003.
It makes sense, right? You run intervals to get your body used to the feeling of running fast. You run a lot of miles to get your body used to running tired. Why not also practice running bonked to get your mind trained to force your body to fight through The Wall? I do my best to pretend that I am running fast, and that’s the source of the pain.
It’s not a very easy thing to do though. You’re slowing down with every quarter mile, so it’s hard to keep from getting mentally discouraged. Sometimes, it’s hard just to not stop and walk. No one is watching. It’s not a race. This can just be a 3 mile run instead of 4. Right?
Then the conversations starts again:
“Are you going to make that a part of your race plan? Unscheduled walking? Do you feel good about the fact that you took unscheduled walks in your last race? Are you happy with the fact that these unscheduled walks cost you a PR by only 15 seconds? If you still want to walk, go ahead. But know that you are teaching yourself that it’s ok to give up. You’re training yourself to miss another PR by 15 seconds.”
Quitting eats peas.
Running through The Wall like a big fat Kool-Aid man rocks.
Here’s the “more with less” personified. Or wait, maybe this is less with more considering the production quality. Either way, if you’d like to play along with Fred Eaglesmith’s “Spookin The Horses”, here’s a play along video. I will do more of these by request if the demand is there. As Ol’ Roadhog once said, “I got a lot of requests for this one, but we’re gonna do it anyway.”