Crappity crap crap

Well, the first half of June was going along pretty well. I was keeping the steady mileage going and had a couple of longer, faster runs. Ripped out a few very strong aerobic runs of under 4:20 pace. And then, WHAM!! I got hit by the work-goes-ballistic bus. My job is working on proposals for engineering consulting projects, and every now and then it just goes mad. And it has, and I had a whole string of days where I was working from 9 to 10:30 or 11, and by the time you get to bed after that, it makes waking up at 5:30 for a run an impossibility. So the past two weeks have been about 30 km each. I have to admit that a couple of weekend hangovers made the situation even worse. And the arrival of the steamy rainy season has taken some of the pleasure out of running. So that is where we are at. I am hoping to try and get back on track from Monday, but have 2 days in Singapore for work coming up this week, so that probably won't help...I'll report back in a couple of weeks. I should also mention that lthough work has been manic, it has also been satisfying and rewarding in its own way, so that is a bit of a paradox.

SPEED!!

In this steady spring (merging into summer) build-up I have been meaning to keep a little bit of speedwork in the mix. I didn't do a very good of that in May. The closest I got was a fartlek consisting of a couple of 1.6 km intervals in 6:00 min on the 2nd, the 3-km time trial on the 6th, and the 3-km time trial on the 28th (see last post). Most of my runs were "lower aerobic" with a couple of "upper aerobics", an "easy" or two and one or two barely qualifying as longs. I suppose that is why the improvement in my 3-km time trials was not especially dramatic.

So to try to redress this lack of speed-work, on Wednesday night, two days ago now, I attended the club's 6 x 1000 m interval workout. Oh, the first one felt horrible! I'm glad Joachim was there to drag me around. Somehow I ran faster than 3:50, but I wasn't sure how. Then, miraculously the second one was a totally different kettle of flathead. I went off feeling fast and the breathing much easier. 3:37! That took a bit out of me, but basically I think the cobwebs were blown away and I then ran 3:39, 3:41, and 3:40 before calling it a day (yes, that's only five for those who were counting). But I did run from work to the track and then home from the track for a 15-km day. Almost Hosakesque. But crikey! Nothing like this man, who seems to be training the house down!

Results of the latest (2nd) 3 km time trial are in. times are the 1-km splits for those that need the decipherin'. I think they know who they are.

May 6: 3:52, 3:52, 3:54
May 28: 3:48, 3:52, 3:52

Actually, I thought it had been a month since I did the first one. A bit silly. I better wait a full month now until the next one.

Anyway, not much progress to be seen. The weeks since then (including the May 6 week) have been 69, 46, 91, 85 (if I do the expected 25 tomorrow). That awful 46 km week happened because I had a weekend that was beset by work and weather and brewing that conspired to stop me running on either the Saturday or Sunday. A very rare event. That resulted in me going into the next week rather fresh and racking up the 90 km. I can't really expect much progress on the back of those numbers, but the regular aerobic runs of 15 km have had a bit of quality about them and are setting me up to handle increased frequency and distance (like he 17.8 km at 4:27/km I did today). After that the results should start to come through.

My Beer!!

I think I mentioned last July that I got a best of show in a home brewing competition. The main prize was that the organizers brew a commercial batch of the recipe, the Yokozuna beer, at a micro brewery in Chiba (Loco Beer). I helped out on the brew day in late December.

Now, five months later, lookie, lookie, that there beer is now on sale over the Interwebs. It isn't cheap, but if you are in Japan, go at it and try some of the best beer ever made in the 5000 plus years of the history of brewing. Oh!! You think that's a bold claim do you? Well, it is a bold claim. And there is only one way you will find out if it is true ;-)

There is a page with an English explanation here.

Where I is at

Running. I've been running. I took a full six days off after the 30k trail race, but then came out and ran pretty easy the next week, reaching a tad over 70 km. I certainly wasn't fully recovered the first few runs, but by last weekend, after two weeks of recovery, felt pretty good and ended up on Sunday running around the trails of Kamakura with Satohi before a BBQ at friends'. I really enjoyed the Kamakura hills because there was not so much walking. Not like the western Tokyo trails, where the hills are up, up, up, and down, down, down. But when the hills are relatively short and technical (read complicated by roots, rocks and erosion), such as at Kamakura, you can attack and use momentum to pick out interesting ways of navigating the terrain. I like that.

This week is Golden Week--three consecutive national holidays from Mon-Wed--and with added rest I've felt my speed coming back naturally, and steady aerobic runs are dipping down under 4:30/km. In fact yesterday I spent 4 km of a 13 km run at below 4:20/km and averaged 4:28/km...not bad.

I'm also throwing in a little bit of speed work here and there. Last Saturday I did two 1.6 km intervals midway through a 14-km run. The first was right on 6:00 min, but it felt forced and labored. The second I tried relaxing into it and ended up running a couple of seconds slower, but it felt more like the right pace.

Today I was going to run in the park in the afternoon with Colin, but the rain set in for several hours, and Colin couldn't make it anyway. I was very frustrated as I really wanted to run, but just couldn't bring myself to head out into what was pretty heavy rain. I waited and waited and was about to give up and pour a beer around 5:45 when I noticed the rain had eased right off. So I made sure dinner was under control and squared things up with the good woman before heading out. I ran up to Oda field (5.5 km) at 4:45/km. There I decided to do the first of what will be a series of monthly 3-km time trials. Did that at a pretty hard effort with rather pedestrian (but not surprising) splits of 3:52, 3:52, and 3:54 ... I was pushing that last km too, so the loss of 2 s really shows I was near the limit. Good. This will stand as a good benchmark of where I am at here at the beginning of May.

Plate Chiller

I recently acquired a plate chiller for my home brewery. Here it is in action.
Edit: For those not sure what is going on here (Bob), beer production involves boiling up malt and hops. At the end of the boil, you want to chill the wort (what it's called before it's fermented) to a suitable temperature for pitching yeast. That's what this device is for. It could also be called a heat exchanger. Hot wort and cold water go in through separate flow paths, make contact along the surfaces of 30 brazed plates, and cold wort and hot water come out. Now I can pitch the yeast and get fermentation underway. I could just let it cool down naturally, but it will take a day or two to reach pitching temperature and increases the risk of a wild yeast or bacteria infection. Happy?

On Trail Races

A few interesting, "I don't get trail races" comments on my last post.

Well, that being only my second trail race, I can't pretend to be some kind of transcended being who has found enlightenment and will now deign to preach the good gospel of The Trail to you poor philistines still wandering in the dark.

No. I am probably closer to that infant state of consciousness of Scott and Jon. And even Bob, who at least admits to enjoying a non-event trail run. But I guess I have some insights and I can feel strange stirrings within.

All I can do is try to offer a couple of thoughts that have occurred to me in the past couple of days. The thing that distinguishes a "race" from a casual training run is that it is an event. On top of that, it is physically very, very demanding, and therefore not likely to be something you will attempt without the surrounding hoop-la of the event. So the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing something very, very demanding, and in often beautiful surroundings, is really unlikely without the event to push/pull you through it.

Like parenthood, these things are also something that you will never, ever be truly able to explain to anybody. You can only understand it by participating. Even to fellow runners who only ever do hard-top races. So there is a real sense of camaraderie and shared experience with your fellow trail hounds (I don't really call myself that, by the way). And this is why events like Six Foot Track and Hasetsune 72 km (this was the first time the 30 km version was has been run) take on such legendary status among those who keep coming back to take on the challenge they offer. I mean look at the profile of Six Foot:



That's pretty awesome. Yet, to me, after running this considerably shorter Hasetsune, I look at that profile and think, Ha! look at those long easy sections: the bottom of Nellies Glen to Cox's River is all clear running, then from the top of Pluviometer it all looks eminently runnable, though the descent to Cave's House would be truly agonizing, as many a race report attests. In Hasetsune you were always either really going up, or really going down. I think in general that the grades were probably steeper than what they would be at Six Foot, yet it is really impossible to compare. Those elevation gains and falls at Six Foot are undeniably big: 250 m at Cox's to 1200 m at caves Road ... this is alluring. Why wouldn't you want to take something like that on? And why would you take it on without the pull of the event?

Hasetsune 72 km literally scares me. And maybe that reason alone is enough to give it a try.

So those are me thoughts on this matter.