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WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting

WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting

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A couple posts back, I wrote about how Coach Jack Daniels (and others) have written about how important turnover is in an athlete’s speed.  Daniels maintains that 180 strikes/minute is the ideal number that will let athletes gain speed but not at the expense of making them think too much or unduly change-up their running form.

That said, on this morning’s 6.11 (I like the random numbers, what can I say!?), which wasn’t really anything besides a maintenance run following Tuesday’s speedish run and in advance of tomorrow’s tempo, for the second part of my run I counted.  And counted.  And counted.  And attempted to do some mental math (not my strong suit, but I managed).

For the record, it is way easier to count armswings than it is to count the number of times my foot hits the pavement.

How’d I fare?  Well, from the about 5 times I did counted, the numbers ranged from around 94 to about 100.

Honestly, I haven’t done this (counted) since 2008, at least from what I can remember.

And really, I don’t know that I even counted correctly, since I was only counting right arm-armswings (because again, counting armswings is way easier than counting footsteps).

When I did a little interwebs research about this just now, it seems like my values are either a) at maximal efficiency (which seems hard to believe because I wasn’t going much faster than MP this morning) or b) could stand to see some improvement.  I’ll tell myself that the latter is the truth.

In the quest of self-improvement…. because we all know I will probably start counting my armswings and footsteps prolifically now… I happened upon an AWESOME site by a vegan athlete (I’m in love!), Matt Frazier, who also has some great instructions as to how to make your cadence quicker and lighter.  While I’m not a fan of the dreadmill, I think next time I have the opportunity to, I’ll hop on a high school track to give his recommendations a try.  Thanks, Matt!

So what’s the rest of the week hold?  Probably about a 4mile tempo tomorrow, 15 on Saturday, and an hour (or so) easy recovery on Sunday.

It’s looming, folks!

WDYDT 3/15: 5.5 maintenance/recovery

WDYDT 3/15: 5.5 maintenance/recovery

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Athlinks.com (a really great site, by the way) has this neat feature called WDYDT– “what did you do today?” — which I’m guessing is supposed to keep the camaraderie and competition high amongst runners on the site (and probably add-in some elements of accountability).  I have a profile on the site– or really, I guess just a compilation of records of races that I’ve run since 2007– so I think it makes more sense to write my WDYDT here instead.  Digression.

So what did I do?  5.5, maintenance, and felt a bit sluggish.  Think the Garmin said it was around a low-8 average, though some of the miles were closer to 7:40s/7:50s before I had a moment with myself and reminded me to “slow the fuck down, Erin!”  (hey, sometimes I need to be that crass with myself)…

Tuesday’s 7×800 Yassos at a sub-3:25 for all of them (and the last handful at sub 3:20, yikes), combined with lots of walking with A over the past few days in the unseasonably warm and sunny weather, and getting a massage yesterday evening, and the fact that I ran today in the mid-70s, I think all compounded to just make my legs feel a bit tired.

Good thing I got the feedback today, though, so I know when I run on Friday and Saturday, in advance of Sunday’s hilly half at March Madness, I’ll keep the miles to a minimum and the volume and intensity to simple maintenance, if not recovery.

On that note, Sunday’s slated to have highs in the mid-70s and lows only in the high 60s.  Maybe it’ll be cooler in the far NW burbs that morning… or at least just from 8:35 until about 10.  We shall see…