4 posts tagged “2006”
I did my first long run of the training season with a CARA group. This is the first time I've run with an organized group, as I've usually trained for various races or just for exercise with friends, or by going solo. CARA is probably the best-known training organization for runners in Chicago; I believe they have over 2,000 registered marathon training program participants meeting at running locations across the city and 'burbs. It's pretty cool; you meet with a group that runs a pace you plan to train with, anywhere from 7:30 to 11:00 minutes/mile, and run the distance that your weekly plan calls for. You can then run with that group for the rest of the season, switch to a different group at a different location, or even change paces if you find you're training too fast or too slow for your planned race pace.
I'm shooting for 8:00 miles throughout my training (with the exception of speed workouts), and I chose that pace group. About 20 of us ran our route on a 60°F morning — unusually cool for late June in Chicago, I can assure you. In my group are a few people running their first marathon, a few seasoned veterans and the rest are runners who have run one or two marathons but are mainly interested in improvement. At least two runners I talked to are trying to qualify for Boston, like me.
One of these runners, Elisabeth, was wearing a wristband GPS from Garmin. How did this gadget escape my notice!? It tracks total mileage, pace, calorie burn, route of travel, and can even monitor pulse with optional accessories. And, of course you can download your routes and plot them against Google Maps, Garmin's own map database, and pretty much drown yourself in your own telemetry.
I'm pretty sure a Forerunner 205 is now on my short list. It has the bonus feature of a "Virtual Partner," which is a phantom racer you can run against to maintain or exceed a particular pace. Plus, it appears to be compact enough that I won't feel quite so much like I've been tagged and then sent back into my natural habitat, transmitter attached. (Wish I could place an img-link of this device directly in the post, without uploading it as a Photo, but I guess I'm trying to get too bloggy for VOX.)
Thanks to Don for MyWebbing a link to mapmyrun.com -- yet another GMaps-meets-distance-training site. This one seems to offer more features than GMaps Pedometer for storing runs, sharing them, and even discovering other runners/routes in your area (OMG! Social Media Alert! OMFG!). There's an RSS feed for my individual saved runs — but what exactly is gonna change about those over time?
Still, it seems, I dunno, clunkier than GMaps. I'll try 'em both out and see how it goes; expect some of my run posts to share their routes, too.
The best part was that I'm trying to establish an 8:00 training pace, and I ran 24:00 flat on this route; this makes me think I'm finally getting good at recognizing my own pace tendencies and evening out my energy expenditure. I have a really nasty tendency to break from the gate too quickly, and that's the last thing I'll want to do this coming October.
I started marathon training this week; I think I'll use this site to post this-and-that about my training experience as the “Road to Boston” unwinds.
This week's daily mileage interval is: 3 / 5 / 3, followed by a long run of 8 on Saturday. It'll be my first with a CARA running group. Today I only managed 4.57 because my standard route seems to be just a bit short of 5; I'd only “eyeballed” the distance before today. (Fortunately, I ran longer than 3 yesterday. So much for precision in all things.)
If you want to see the route I ran, and discover a fantastic Google Maps-powered tools in the process, check out my saved route from Gmaps Pedometer. I always give this guy a few ad clicks just for building such a useful tool for runners, cyclists, and really anyone using distance for training.
