Breaking the Wall

Sasha,

I'm amazed by how well you recover.

Anyway, another crazy idea. How about starting a www.fastrunningblog.com running club? I know many of the folks using the site are probably already members of some club but many of us are not. We could even try something crazy like forming teams (dividing interested folks up to balance out skill levels and then have a series of races they must run with varying weights based on difficulty). We could keep score based a function of finishing time and difficuly weighting.

We could have t-shirts made up for the different teams.

Anyway, just some crazy, fun ideas.

ooo...teams, good idea. Plus, for those of us who are injured, we could even do "fantasy running teams", just like fantasy football. Every week we'll draft our runners for the upcoming race, and then score our runners against other fantasy players. Winner of the fantasy circuit gets a free Fastrunningblog t-shirt and hat.

Thanks for the encouragement. I surprised myself. I think I may have been over trained. I'm re-motivated. The Mid Mountain Marathon took a lot out of me, that's a hard race. You could probably win it, the course record is about 3:05. I really want to run the NYC marathon, and I guess I can skip the lottery with a 3:09. My new goal is a sub 3 hrs. I think I can do it on the right course, maybe St. George next year. What do you need to qualify for the Olympic trials? How close are you?

I think I saw you at the finish of St. George.

Sasha, great race and amazing recovery, like many people noticed before. You must not have any serious biomechanical issues in addition to having build very strong muscles and ligaments over the years. But your cardio and nervous systems seem to be able to recover just as quickly! I remember after some of my marathons, I just didn't have any desire to run for weeks, I was just so spent, both physically and emotionally.

While you're making improvements to the blog (the race report addition is very nice, thank you!), would you consider adding shoe mileage counter to the daily entry? It would probably require a new table at the DB level, as well as a change to the entry template, but should be fairly straight forward. This is one thing that is preventing me from using this blog exclusively. Most (b)logs have it and it's an important feature. I must know how many miles I have on each pair - to know when to replace it.

Maria:

The real shoe mileage counter with the ability to add/delete/modify shoes, and track the mileage for each will take a little while. However, I can do a quick hack quite easily with the current system- Trainer Mileage/Racer Mileage/Other Shoe mileage. Would that be helpful for you?

Once I get around to coding up user-definable templates, you'll be able to track whatever you want.

Biomechanically I am probably at the level of your average 2:50-3:00 marathoner. So I do not look too bad in that crowd, probably even quite good with the strength of the push and the ease of the pace creating some visual deceptions, but my competitors can tell me from half a mile away when I am racing . I do look out of place in the 2:25-2:30 pack. I am currently working on fixing it.

The "quick hack" would help, definitely. Not the same as real counter, but should work, as long as I remember which shoe is the trainer, other or racer and can reset mileage after getting new shoes. I usually have 2 pairs of trainers that I rotate and one pair of racers, so it would work nicely. I assume it will be possible to enter "pre-existing" mileage on a pair on the first entry. Thanks!