San Silvestre Vallecana 2013

I'm in! It was a bit touch-and-go yesterday as the website was down for most of the day (not a good idea to open it at a specific time and date if you want to avoid a colapse). This year I decided to run the popular edition rather than the international edition I ran last year, and I will most likely accompany my wife. I say "most likely" because it depends on (a) whether she actually runs it and (b) whether I run the Aranjuez 10K the week before. If I don't make it to Aranjuez for whatever reason, I'll want to let off steam instead in the San Silvestre race on New Year's Eve. So, as a precaution, I've registered with a qualifying time in order to be able to start from a faster corral. Last year, the women were given the option to start further ahead, so it may come in handy anyway.

I won't yet reveal what I will be dressed as this year (it's a good one!) but, in case you missed them. you can see previous years below:

San Silvestre NYE 2010 (I ended up with some nasty blisters)

San Silvestre NYE 2011 (Abba)

San Silvestre International NYE 2012

Aranjuez 10K Week 2 / 6

Monday: 6 x 1,600m @ 3:25
Tuesday: -
Wednesday: 22 x (30" @ 3:00, 30" @ 6:00)
Thursday: 20' @ 4:00, 10' @ 4:27, 20' @ 4:00
Friday: 6 x (400m @ 3:09 + 200m jog, 200m @ 2:51 + 100m jog) + 400m @ 3:09
Saturday: 40' @ 4:00 (morning) + plyometrics, 40' @ 4:00 (afternoon)
Sunday: 40' @ 4:00 (morning), 40' @ 4:00 (afternoon)
Total kilometers: 73

As a part of my participation in the Santander Por Tu Corazón study, I decided to undergo a test on Wednesday which consisted of a combined PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scan. I had to take Tuesday off from training and fast for four hours (not even liquids) before the test. The MRI is used to get an accurate map of my atheroschlerotic plaques (the fatty deposits in the arteries) and lesions while the PET image is superimposed on this in order to measure any metabolic activity (i.e., are they growing). While I've been told that my case is very low risk, the study precisely wants to focus on heathly people with plaques because the norm is that people are only aware that they have them as part of a post-cardiac arrest / stroke autopsy by which time it is clearly to late. Any excuse for a free cutting edge test and an afternoon off work, only it was harder than I thought it would be to endure...

The first step involved being injected with a radioactive tracer which, in this case, was a sugar designed to highlight metabolic activity. I had to keep completely still for half an hour so I just dozed off. The test itself required me satying in the same position (other than a brief break halfway to stretch my legs) for the best part of 2 and a half hours while I was wheeled in an out of one donut shaped machine, spun around, and wheeled in and out of another donut shaped machine. The PET scan was fairly inobtrusive but the MRI made one hell of a racket (no more siesta I'm afraid) and at times I was sure I could even feel my internal organs vibrating in sympathy. The MRi was synched to my heart beat so that the images would be taken at exactly the same moment as the blood was flowing through my arteries. Of course, having a loud noise beating in time with your heart tends to increase your heart rate (think of house music in a night club) but, in spite of this, my heart rate was around 40 bpm which, I was told, made the test harder for the technicians to conduct. The hardest part was the last section, with my head secured in a Hannibal Lecteresque face mask, when I was told that I should try to avoid swallowing. It's a bit like being told not to scratch your nose - there's no better way to make you desperate to do exactly the opposite. When it was all finally over, I was told to keep away from small children and pregnant women because I was still radioactive. I went to the gym afterwards to do my vVO2Max session of 22 x 30" at 20 kph and so I probably looked like Dynamo from the Running Man film, as I gave off radioactive sweat.

For my quality session on Friday, I thought I would try a little experiment. I'd read that sodium bicarbonate can help performance for relatively short and intense efforts. I've only needed to drink two times during a training session in the whole year (including my 35 km long runs) - this was the second time! I'd forgotten that sodium bicarbonate was similar to table salt. Apart from this, this session felt so much easier than the same one I did last week, outside in the cold Moscow air. I suppose it is cheating slightly not having to deliver the pace but rather just avoid being thrown off the back of the belt but it was mainly due I think to the pace being much more even.

On Saturday morning I took the kids to the swimming pool. I was able to do my run on treadmill in the gym while watching them swim! The gym actually had a plyometric box which was perfect for my jumping exercises. I wasn't able to find one in the local shops but a search on the internet revealed that they are quite expensive, so I may try to build my own one when I get a chance. I did find one plyometric box that caught my attention because it included padding to soften the imapct. Surely the whole point about plyometrics is to activate the Stretch Shortening Cycle and any padding is just going to interfere. It seems akin to running on a treadmill while using your arms to lighten the load on your legs (I find it bizarre that some people walk on the treadmill with a steep incline while holding on to the bars).

Sunday was going to be my rest day but I felt pretty good so I ended up doing another two 10 km runs at Marathon Pace, taking my weekend total to a fairly respectable 40 kilometers. It's in no small part due to being hooked on "Game of Thrones" that I have been on the treadmill so much lately. I'll see how I feel on Monday as to whether I take a day off or launch straight into my quality session of a split 10K at race pace.

The first 100 shoes to cross the finish line of NYC Marathon

Somebody has actually gone to the trouble of photographing and identifying the first 100 runners to cross the finish line of the New York City Marathon and their shoes. (Bear in mind that the elite women had a head start of 30 minutes.)

Someone else has gone to the trouble of putting all the results in a spreadsheet opening up the possibilities for hours of geeky analysis. (Meb was wearing Sketchers!)

While it is not surprising to see the top male and female finishers shod in either Nike or Addidas due to sponsorship requirements, what did surprise me was that none of the other runners chose to run in what I would categorize as a "minimalist running shoe". It certainly appears to be the case that the shoes have less cushioning on average than those worn by the 50,000 runners in the chasing pack but we are still talking about more than a couple of centimetres of squishy-squashy soles.

The other striking observation (if you'll forgive the pun) is the number of heel strikers amongst the elite. But, if you look closely, there is a world of difference between the typical heel-striker below

and the one seen above. The key difference is in the angle of the shin which, in the second photo, is such that the knee joint is locked out (ouch!!) and the point of contact is well ahead of the centre of gravity leading to a braking force. In order to run like the person above, you need to have tremendous flexibility and strength in your ankles - you almost have to fight against the tendency of the shoes to encourage you to overstride. Conversely, from personal experience I can testify to it being even more injurious to overstride and land on your forefoot. Perhaps we should stop obsessing so much over heel strikers versus forefoot (or midfoot?) strikers and look first at shin angles. From the excellent new book Running Science:

It's a shame that the article didn't go as far as the first 221 shoes to cross the finish line of the NYC Marathon... :-)

Aranjuez 10K Week 1 / 6

Monday: 2 x 3 x 1,600 @ 3:25
Tuesday: 40' easy
Wednesday: 20 x (30" @ 3:00, 30" @ 6:00)
Thursday: 45' @ 4:27
Friday: -
Saturday: 6 x (400m @ 3:15, 200m @ 2:50) + 400m w/ 2-3' rest
Sunday: 45' @ 4:21
Total kilometers: 46

The interesting half of this week I was in Moscow. I had been asked to present at a conference but then that conference was cancelled and I decided to go anyway, with my wife and no kids (4th time in 11 years for a "DINKy" - Double Income No Kids - weekend). As a bit of holiday reading, I bought a Russian text ("Supertraining", translated into Spanish) on strength training for my Kindle by one of the forefathers of "plyometrics", Yuri Verkhoshansky.

I found a gym which I planned to do my quality workout on Saturday morning but a day pass turned out to cost about 75 euros and the running machines were so slow to increase speed that running such short intervals would have been absurd. Instead, I braved the cold and ran the stretch between two bridges on the opposite side of the river from Red Square while my wife jogged past. With my generous rests in between sets, we ended up running about the same distance in the same time. The uneven pavement made the 200m intervals at over 21 kph quite hair-raising; I would start the 400m at what was quite an aggressive pace to find that I was literally wheezing and slowing down to a trot for the last 100m. Probably not the optimal execution but a good workout nonetheless and one from which I am still recovering today as I write this.

It's not the first time this year that I've seen that green bike somewhere unexpected

Just as I stayed on Madrid time when I went to New York a couple of weeks ago, it was also convenient to stay on Madrid time in Russia. As a result we would get up around 10:30 am (no kids!), have breakfast around 12:00 pm, lunch around 4 pm and dinner at 11 pm. I was suprised to find that not only were there many reasonable and good quality restaurants open 24 hours but we were not the only people eating at such strange times. So on the Sunday, just before checking out of the apartment, I went for a run around the river. I think I saw one other runner the whole time during the 3 days we spent there. Considering that Moscow supposedly had introduced a bike share scheme this year, I was expecting to see at least some bikes if not people riding them: nothing. I know it is cold, wet and windy but no more so in November than London! That, and the fact that people still smoke so much and in restaurants, were the only things which made the city seem a bit of a throwback; otherwise it was very clean, modern and impressive.

Whoohoo, the results are in!

I feel like I've finally got closure... 5 years of waiting meant that being patient during these last few days was that much harder...

Before and after

Amsterdam Marathon 2008 (3:58)

New York City Marathon 2013 (2:47)

Training plan for Aranjuez 10K

So, as I have said, my idea now is to try to improve my speed while I still can. At 41¾ I'm hardly at the peak age for athletic prowess but, on the other hand, I've read somewhere that the number of years running should be considered as an independent factor. In my case (not counting my "youth") I've been running for six years solidly now and, while it's clear that the gains are becoming ever more marginal, it is also true that I have acheived a significant PR in all my race distances this year, especially in the Marathon (8 minutes).

Up until now I have tended not to focus on shorter distances and have almost always raced over 10K and Half Marathon distances on route to a full Marathon. As a result, my training has never been very specific for these distances. I recently bought an excellent new book on running called Running Science which brings together much of the latest research in sports and exercise science. I've taken some ideas from this book and especially specific quality workouts.

The three main principles I want to take into account (the first two of which shouldn't be much of a surprise if you have been following this blog) are:

Specificity. Apart from being harder, running at higher speeds is very different from running slowly. In fact, running at speeds of less than 10 kph is so different it is commonly called "jogging". But without going to such extremes, the biomechanics of running at 13.5 kph (recovery pace), 15 kph (Marathon pace) and 17 kph (optimistic 10K pace) are all quite different. Logically, running at 15 kph is good training for competing at 15 kph just as running at 17 kph is good training for competing at 17 kph. Nevertheless, running at speeds faster than 17 kph probably has some kind of trickle-down effect and improves economy at lower speeds. For these reasons, I will try to incorporate as much race pace training as possible and use the "junk miles" to actively recover from these efforts.

Eccentric strength. Especially at these higher speeds, running economy becomes very important. If you study the activation of muscles with an EMG while running, you find that the muscles are not activated during the "push off" phase but rather during the "stance" (quadriceps, arches of feet and soleus are loaded) and "flight" (hamstrings brake leg swing). If you muscle it, you actively contract your muscles in order to pull yourself along; this is much more inefficient than loading your muscles up like a spring in what is called the Stretch Shortening Cycle (SSC). Normally, we move our limbs by contracting (shortening) our mucle fibres - this is called concentric loading. During the SSC, the muscles are actually lengthening under load (concentric loading): once that load is removed, the muscles and tendons snap back elastically. It's well known, for example, that it is possible to jump higher immediately after jumping from a height to the ground. The downside of eccentric movements is that they more likely to lead to injury as the muscle is clearly weaker in its stretched state. Therefore it is important both for injury prevention and for performance to work on eccentric muscle strength and plyometrics and the Shock Method are the best way I know of to do this. An added benefit might be prevention of cramps. Muscle cramps that occur due to chronic muscle use (as opposed to heat cramps, for example) - Exercise Associated Muscle Cramps (EAMC) - are thought to be a result of an imbalance between increased reflex activity in the muscle spindle and decreased reflex activity in the Golgi Tendon Organ (GTO). The muscle spindle monitors the length of the muscles in contraction and can trigger a Stretch Reflex (for example, if a doctor taps your knee). The role of the GTO is to monitor the stretching of muscles and can trigger a Golgi Tendon Reflex (or Inverse Stretch Reflex) which has the opposite effect to the Stretch Reflex of relaxing the muscle (this is why stretching often helps aleviate EAMC) in order to limit possible muscle damage. The imbalance is thought to be due to over-excitation of the GTO during repeated concentric muscle activation. It would stand to reason, then, that training to increase eccentric muscle strength could help the GTO to become more resiliant to fatigue as well as reducing its activity in running. (This is my speculation but I will try to find some research on the matter.)

vVO2Max. "VO2Max" is dead, long live "vVO2Max"! It seems that VO2Max is a relatively poor way to explain differences between athletes while vVO2Max, or the velocity at which one attains maximum oxygen consumption, is a much better metric. Not only that, but an increase in vVO2Max correlates highly with time improvements in races of all distances. As my goal is to improve my speed in particular, it makes sense to work on my vVO2Max. Currently, this stands at 20 kph from a test I did in February - unfortunately this is only accurate to the nearest 1 kph and it is relatively unlikely I will improve enough to progress to 21 kph but time will tell.

6 week training plan for Aranjuez 10K
- 1 day off a week
- 2-3 quality sessions (Q1-3) a week alternating with 45-60 recovery runs
- Q1 = vVO2Max, Q2 = intervals, Q3 = race pace
- 1-2 sessions of plyometrics
- pace, number of repetitions and rest periods subject to adjustment

Week #1
Q1: > 20 x (30" @ 3:00 m:s / km, 30" @ 6:00)
Q2: 6 x (400m-200m) + 400m, 400m @ 3:10 w/ 1' jog, 200 m @ < 3:00 w/ 30" jog
Q3: 2 x 3 x 1,600m @ 3:25 w/ 1' rest

Week #2
Q1: > 20 x (30" @ 3:00 m:s / km, 30" @ 6:00)
Q2: 6 x (400m-200m) + 400m, 400m @ 3:10 w/ 1' jog, 200m @ < 3:00 w/ 30" jog
Q3: 6 x 1,600m @ 3:25 w/ 1' rest

Week #3
Q1: > 10 x (60" @ 3:00 m:s / km, 60" @ 6:00)
Q2: 3 x (800-400-200-1,000) @ 3:40, jog 2', 3:25, jog 1', 3:10, jog 30", 3:40, jog 4'
Q3: 1K, jog 2', 3K, jog 5', 2K, jog 4-5', 3K, jog 5', 1K @ 3:30-3:35

Week #4
Q1: > 10 x (60" @ 3:00 m:s / km, 60" @ 6:00)
Q2: 3 x (800-400-200-1,000) @ 3:40, jog 2', 3:25, jog 1', 3:10, jog 30", 3:40, jog 4'
Q3: 1K, jog 1', 3K, jog 3', 2K, jog 2', 3K, jog 3', 1K @ 3:30

Week #5
Q1: 5 x 1,000 @ 3:00 w/ 3' rest
Q2: 3 x (200-600-1,000) @ < 3:00, 3:10-3:25, 3:40-3:30, w/ 3-4' rest between sets
Q3: 10K @ 3:40, 3% incline

Week #6
Q1: 1K, jog 1', 3K, jog 2', 2K, jog 1', 3K, jog 2', 1K @ 3:30
Q2: 10K (2-5' @ 3:35, 1-3' @ easy)