The crew at Running Ahead are busy following the progress of one of their members, Michael Henze, who posts under the moniker Dopple Bock. You can tell by the insanely high monthly numbers that he was training for something special, that something being the IAU 24hour Championships in France. At the point of this posting, Mr. Henze had covered 192km in 18 hours and 22 minutes, over a 1.26831 km loop, sitting 20th overall and 3rd American (ultra-maniac Scott Jurek is in 2nd, and 1st American). Besides needing to be loopy just to do this race, doing it on a 1.3k loop would put anyone over the edge.
I can't fathom that much running. I cover 2 hours and I'm ready to quit. It must take some form of fortitude to fight the discomfort and the demons that lurk with the time involved. You would need to be so incredibly comfortable with running, you would need to live it, breath it and basically make it your every waking hour, to run something like this and actually be competitive in it. I don't know what you would do when you finish a race of this type. Drop on the spot...crawl under a leaf and sleep...celebrate by doing a jig. I dunno.
For me, I had a couple of off days, getting only 11 miles from Monday to Wednesday with a few screwups in my schedule (including forgetting to pack my shorts for noontime runs). I did get 12ish in today so it makes up a little bit for it. It's okay, the legs appreciated the short break. Weather's been off this week as well, it seems April was the prime month this season so far and May has definitely seen the cool off.
Just over 4 weeks to Durham forest. Gotta keep it up.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Friday, May 07, 2010
7 days 70 miles
It's May 7. My log shows 70.9 for the month so far. It's been a quiet week and I've been able to haul my butt out of bed at the 6:30 alarm and get out for (most of) an hour each morning. Then my standard 5 easy at lunchtime. Didn't do a hill workout since I wanted to be getting out twice a day and kept the priority on that. The consistency makes a difference and you can feel it after even one week.
It's not hard to do but it sure can be freaking boring at times. It's all time and not really miles, an hour here, and hour and some there, 30 minutes here. The miles are just scenery passing by and cracks in the sidewalks moving under your feet. After a while you feel like all you're doing is running all the time. I can't imagine what the guys pumping out 130, 140...200 feel like. I can see myself doing a couple of hours a day, I don't think that's really all that extreme or excessive. If I capped noons to 45 minutes, I could see 1:15 in the mornings and that would all be doable. The trick is to keep the effort down so you're not needing a good 24 or more hours recovery. Fine for a while, I could make a May of it.
Inevitably everything else spills over that time so I'm not in bed on time, not able to get out at noon or for long enough, things get cut short, yada yada yada. Basic rule is, run when you can cuz later might not work out. We'll see how the month goes.
It's not hard to do but it sure can be freaking boring at times. It's all time and not really miles, an hour here, and hour and some there, 30 minutes here. The miles are just scenery passing by and cracks in the sidewalks moving under your feet. After a while you feel like all you're doing is running all the time. I can't imagine what the guys pumping out 130, 140...200 feel like. I can see myself doing a couple of hours a day, I don't think that's really all that extreme or excessive. If I capped noons to 45 minutes, I could see 1:15 in the mornings and that would all be doable. The trick is to keep the effort down so you're not needing a good 24 or more hours recovery. Fine for a while, I could make a May of it.
Inevitably everything else spills over that time so I'm not in bed on time, not able to get out at noon or for long enough, things get cut short, yada yada yada. Basic rule is, run when you can cuz later might not work out. We'll see how the month goes.
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