Shocking

I found this article yesterday, but didn't get a chance to finish it until this morning. Unbelieveable. The first question that comes to mind is, why has it taken so long for this to get written? This kind of expose/explanation should have been written years ago. It's obvious that the effects of these drugs have been well known in the medical community for a long time, and any one of hundreds or even thousands of doctors could have provided this information. The dirty bastards.

Anyway, while I read the article, I alternated between feeling mildly sick at the thought of how easy all this training becomes when a person is on drugs, and mildly happy that I don't have the funds or the desire to try any of this stuff myself. I imagined what kind of marathon I could run after a five year training period if I could run 20 miles a day at my best aerobic pace and never have to stop to recover. Then I imagined having to look back at those five years in complete shame with a complete lack of satisfaction, knowing that I didn't do my best, but the best that my money and my doctor could provide.

I feel sorry for anyone who was talented enough to keep rising through the ranks, but not good enough to keep competing well without drugs. If they were less talented, perhaps they wouldn't have tried to make a career out of sport and forced to make a choice between taking drugs and being able to pay the rent.

I'm happy that my potential best is nothing compared to international standards. I will never have to worry about making that choice. Instead, I choose every day to get out of bed, run the workouts I think I should run, and see how fast I can get. For myself. By myself.

Chicago in October

The running is going well lately. With the exception of some high winds here the last few days, everything is peaches. I've been taking a day off to rest a bit once a week, so my weeks are six days with mileage right in the 55-60 range. This week should approach 70. The hip and leg are feeling really good, with the exception of the days off, which is really weird, so I'm definitely healing up and should be ready to start building up the miles again.

I've started another blog for logging my training. This one is updated daily (for as long as I can stand it) and will just contain grammatically incorrect sentence fragments about the day's training. Once a week, and probably once a month, I will sum it all up and hopefully it will be big, impressive, consistent numbers with no injury/laziness time outs. I've linked it up permanently over to the right side of the page, near the picture of the fake hill that I sometimes pretend to run up and down on.

I'm getting very excited to see what everyone does in Chicago. Greg, Dallen, Evan, and Zeke will all be looking for PR or near PR performances. Good luck, guys!

A Good Kind of Frustrated

This weather is a pain in the ass. In the last three days it has been under 30 degrees with 15-25 mile per hour winds, and yesterday we had snow. I'm pretty motivated coming off of this injury, so it's more than a little frustrating to be working hard and running slower than I would like, and then running even slower because of the conditions.

I tried a shorter tempo run this morning, trying my best to stay in the trees and out of the gusting 35 mph wind. The result was a less than exciting 5:55 pace average for three miles, at heart rates approaching 95% of max by the end. But the good news is, I am able to do something faster than 6:20 pace without re-injuring, so that is progress.

The recovery seems to be on track, based on the last week or so of running, so although I'm champing at the bit to get back to 'normal', I need to exercise some patience getting there. November through January will be base building and maintenance anyway, so there is plenty of time before the next marathon build-up starts in February.

Time for coffee.

Reindeer Milk Popsicles

This past week went pretty well. I was able to put in 59 miles, including one faster eight mile run and a 16+ mile run. There is still the slightest hint of my lingering quad/hip injury, but stretching and warming up well are keeping it in check. In the next week or two, it will hopefully get over the hump and go away completely.

The weather here is starting to turn 'seasonal'. We had a nice 82 degree day on Friday, and another nice 70+ day on Saturday, but I think our Indian Summer has come to an end. This morning it is a crisp 30 degrees with a bit of wind. Mornings from now on will be cool and getting cold in the next month. After that, continuously cold, with morning temperatures registering the kind of cold you don't get used to. Lasse Viren trained in worse and didn't complain. Must have been the beard.

Rollercoaster

I've had some up days, like today, and some down days in the last week or so. I was able to get a 14 miler in today, feeling pretty good. I had to stop once to stretch out at around five miles, but otherwise the run was uneventful.

I'm finding that it takes me a solid half hour to prepare for a run since starting up again. Usually fifteen minutes of biking and fifteen minutes of stretching. Hopefully this will get less and less shortly, because it is a pain in the ass.

I was a little bit disappointed to see that this would have been a good year to run TCM in terms of placing. The first sub-2:30 was 27th place, and 2:39:19 was 50th. I had set a time goal of 2:29:xx and a place goal of top 30. Obviously, it's ridiculous to talk about any of this not having run the race, but it cool to look at the way things worked out and see that if I had achieved either, I would have acheived both.

Anyway, I can put that behind me now and look forward to the next goal. As I was on my run today, I thought about my plans for 2007. I haven't given up on running faster in shorter distances, so I'm thinking I will run a spring marathon and then use that fitness toward a summer of shorter races, trying to set myself up for a peak 5k and 10k.

Sounds nice. We'll see what happens.