Tuesday, March 23, 2010
F4 Head Coach Scott shares his pre-race goals and post race report from last weekend's Moab Canyonlands Half Marathon
Thank you to those who posted their pre-race goals and thereby helped many others to visualize and achieve success in Moab this past weekend.
I wanted to post a quick race report in order to show how this "before" exercise helps play off on race day, in hopes that more may take the opportunity next time.
As my goals above alluded, I was not nearly as specifically prepared for this race as most of you were, and therefore did not have the pacing data/ feedback from the many Zone 2 workouts that you did. For example, I was not able to do the 3 x 3 mile at "Race Pace" workout, which surely would've provided me some good (up to date) info from which to base a pacing strategy.
As such, I'd illustrated my goals based on my extensive knowledge of how an ideal half marathon should "feel", gleaned from having raced the distance over twenty times. Of course, as the past dozen or so have been run at a pace somewhere between 6:15/ mi. and 6:45/ mi., I was also able to "guess" that my current fitness was somewhere right in the middle and would therefore use 6:30/ mi. as an additional piece of objective feedback.
The race played out in thirds pretty much exactly as I expected it would. I had Denver Head Coach Garry Roseman along for company through about halfway, and then "let" him go on to finish about a minute ahead of me. We ran the first mile at about the right effort, and given the prominent elevation loss there, I was comfortable seeing ?6:10? on my watch at the first mile marker. We then clicked off 6:25, 6:24,6:30, and 6:23 miles while enjoying being right in the midst of the women's leaders and feeling 'pretty comfortable' as I'd planned.
The next third, I ran almost the exact same pace, but the cumulative effort started to feel ?pretty hard? and I really needed to focus a lot more on keeping good form, relaxed breathing, and staying well hydrated. Speaking of aid stations, Garry and I had decided in advance to use a modified run/ walk strategy in order to give the running muscles a short break and bring down the heart rate a bit every now and then. As such we grabbed a cup at each aid station, and walked briskly for 15 seconds while consuming the contents vs. spilling it all on our new F4 shirts. We were willing to let the pack we?d been running with get away temporarily, but it was really cool to reel them back with out really lifting the effort noticeably. The middle five miles were 6:30, 6:25, 6:27, 6:34, and 6:34 (avg. 6:30 exactly). I?ll definitely be exploring the benefits of run/walk in future training and racing events this season!
The final 3.1 miles were supposed to be ?darned hard?, and they didn?t disappoint. At about mile 10.5 I left the comforts of the canyon to run about a mile and a half along the highway with cars, trucks, and tons of orange cones. As I'd planned, I resisted the temptation to be annoyed at these potential distractions and instead turned a perfect 6:30 for mile 12, and then set about catching two guys that were only about 50 yards in front of me with a mile to go. The last mile my legs were VERY heavy and my peripheral vision started to go 'plaid' kinda like the scene in SpaceBalls (or Star Wars or Star Trek for that matter) when they go into hyper-space mode and everything gets kinda fuzzy around the edges. Again, thanks to my experience with such sensations near the end of 100+ races, I knew this was actually a good thing, that I was indeed applying maximum effort, and that soon enough the finish line would appear and all would be OK once again. I did in fact catch the two guys, and muster a 6:21 from mile 12 to 13, and hold them off through the finish chute despite my badly deteriorating form. The last 3 mile splits were 6:47, 6:30, 6:21, and then however long it took to go .1 mile as I never actually stopped my watch. The average for those miles was 6:33, but the average level of perceived exertion was quite a bit higher; as I knew it would be. Official finish time: 1:24:48. About three minutes off my PR, but certainly the very best I could do on the day, given the low/ moderate level of training I'd done this season.
One final note, and one I plan to expand upon in a future post or article, is the value of one or two key 'over exertion' or 'relative discomfort' workouts in the taper week or two leading up to the big race. For me, this came in the form of a simple looking 2 x 15 minute Zone 2 workout on a treadmill about 10 days before the race. The pace I set on the machine equaled 6:40/ mile, which one would think would be rather easy to do given the 6:28/ mi. pace I would sustain for 84 consecutive minutes only a short time later. However, as most of us know by now, the 'perceived effort' of a given pace on a lonely treadmill with little external motivation such as a race, fellow racers or a cheering crowd, can be much, much higher.
The crux of the workout came about halfway through the second set when it got REALLY hard. There were some physiological markers that the effort was taking its tool, such as raised heart rate and respiration rate, but primarily it was just becoming SO hard mentally. I came very, very close to stopping about a dozen times, but for reasons that would not reveal themselves for another 10 days; I pushed on to finish the set, making a bit of a spectacle of myself in the gym with assorted grunting and seemingly over-dramatic ?dismount?.
'FastForward' to mile 11 in Moab, as I ran alongside semi-trucks and my 6:30 pace was creeping in the wrong direction. I suddenly flashed back to that dreaded treadmill session and realized that my current state of discomfort was far less than what I'd pushed through that afternoon by myself. Sure, I was hurting pretty good at this point and my form was breaking down, but compared with the 9.9 'pain' score I'd assigned the final set of that treadmill workout, I could honestly say I was only feeling about a 7 or 8 at that moment, and the finish line was only two miles away.
That revelation washed over me like a splash of Aqua Velva (yes, I was raised on 70?s TV sports), and I knew that I had the toughness to overcome this relatively mild period of discomfort for another mile or two. My cadence picked up, and my pace dropped back down to 6:30/ mi. for mile 12, then 6:21 for the final mile, and then I was done and felt really proud of my multi-faceted effort, including a winning combo of physical preparation and execution, tactics, and toughness.
Alan Culpepper once said to a group of F4 coaches, when asked how he deals with the 'pain' on race day, that he simply visualizes a recent workout when the relative discomfort was much higher, and that helps him get through those rough patches. So, whether you intentionally go into such prep workouts expecting to recall them on race day, or they just end up serving that role retrospectively, it is good to keep such experiences 'on file' and up to date so that you can put them to good use when you really need them on race day.