Legs still felt really dead this afternoon. Took about 5.5 miles to loosen up. Then, with the wind behind me, I could run decently. Before that, it was a struggle. Stretching didn't help. Neither did the 80-degree temps or the headwind in the first 3.5 miles. If today was a recovery day, I'm like the economy -- there's a lot more recovery needed. Planning another five miles later on, probably on the DM. Turned out to be 5.02 in 47:00, with the DM set at 2.0%; legs felt a lot better at 7:30 p.m. than they did at 1:30. Addendum, shortly before I go do my second run of the day: Have some thoughts about this process I want to get down. If someone wants to comment on them, great; if not, I just want to sort through what's in my head. All the experts say train for where you are, not where you want to be, and adjust your training as your fitness improves. I don't concur with that, because my whole purpose in doing this is to get faster. I believe that I will get faster as my training improves, not the other way around. Put it another way, if I never ran a faster time, my training would not change under the experts' advice. I think I have to MAKE myself run faster times by working harder. Yes, that increases the risk of injury, but that's part of the process too. I'm seeking out my limits -- not only how fast I can run, but how hard I can train without breaking down. I want to listen to what my body tells me to minimize the risk of injury, but I know that in seeking out my limits, I may slam into one of them headlong. If that happens, so be it; I found one of those limits I'm seeking. Then I'll try to figure out how to change or get around that limit. There's another limit that I found 34 years ago. As a 14-year-old high school freshman, I ran an 880 in 2:14 (yes, I'm old enough that I ran before all U.S. track converted to the metric system). Mediocre to be sure, but that was my best performance as a kid. The running calculators say that a 2:14 880 is somehow equivalent to a 2:47 marathon, if I trained for the marathon as well as I had trained for that half-mile as a ninth-grader (was that the best I could have done? Who knows?). The calculators also say that that 2:14 880 indicates a VDOT of 63. I also ran a 2-mile in 11:02 as a 15-year-old, which converts to a VDOT of 57. Even using the more conservative number, a VDOT of 57 corresponds to a 2:50 marathon, properly trained. Point here being, at one point this body was theoretically capable of sub-3:00 marathoning. I'm 48 now, and I'm not going to run any more 11:02s or 2:14s, and I'm probably not going sub-3 either. But the questions are, how much of that ability I used to have is still there, and, unanswerably, how much more talent did I have then that I never tapped? That's what I'm trying to find out, and that's why I'm willing to slam headlong into those limits. This is all a big experiment, and I'm my own lab rat, complete with treadmill. In this running life, my best performance was the half at Conway last October, when my 1:40:29 converts to a 44.87 VDOT. If I had been able to run Memphis at a 44.87 VDOT, I would have qualified for Boston. My 43.63 VDOT at Memphis left me 2:43 short of BQ. The calculator I'm using says that 3:30:59 (the slowest I can go at this age and qualify for Boston) is a 44.31. So, obviously, the immediate goal is to train so that I can get that 44.31 at least. But since I've already done better than that in a half, I know that 44.31 is not my VDOT limit. I want to know, or at least get a better idea, what that limit is for this body at this age range. Is it 45? Is it 48? Is it 50? The calculator says a 50 converts to 3:10:xx. Can I run a 3:10 eventually? My theory is to overreach some in my training, so that if I don't have a perfect day on race day, I still have room to get my goals. Train for a 47 VDOT or so to try to make sure I can get that 44.31, and maybe I can run a 46 along the way. That plan worked for me in Memphis in getting a huge PR and getting well under 4 hours. I hope it will do the same in Newport to get the BQ and beyond. I don't want to have to rely on picking up that extra five minutes to BQ as a 50-year-old in 2011 (which means a VDOT of 43.08). If I have to do that, so be it, and I'm sure not going to turn down a BQ, but that's not testing my limits. That's settling for a sub-limit performance I already know I can top. I want to squeeze what I can out of this body, while I can.
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