The RunRunLive 3.0 Podcast Episode 3-263 – Brad Warner – HardCore Zen, Punk Rock and Monster Movies
Introductory Comments:
Hello and welcome to episode 3-263 of the RunRunLive podcast. How’s everyone doing? I had a bit of a scare this week. I overdid it last weekend. I went out and ran 20 miles on the road in the teeth of a 90+ degree day, ran again on Sunday, then piled on with a hard track workout on Tuesday. I woke up after that with a sore heel and was quite afraid the old PF monster was back.
I’m such an idiot that I was stressing over missing my 1600 workout on Thursday and my long run on Saturday – until I slapped myself and realized the best thing was to STOP! I re-activated my club membership and did my Thursday night interval workout in the pool as a pool run. If you don’t know what that means go search my web-site for ‘AquaJogging”.
Since I hadn’t pool run for 8 months and decided it would be a good idea to START with an intense interval workout – (layers of compulsive idiocy) – I got about 45 minutes into it before my feet and calves cramped up and chased me out! The heel was still sore on Friday so I scuttled the extra-long run I had scheduled for Saturday and hit the gym hard Friday night as punishment for being weak!
I took Saturday as a rest day but when I woke up Sunday the heel seemed to be workable, so I took Buddy out for a 2.5 mile trail run in the woods. Poor guy hasn’t been running much and he was pretty sore for a couple days.
As of right now it seems I’ve avoided hurting myself and the heel is back in line. I did a medium speed workout on the treadmill Tuesday without any ill-effects.
All in all it really doesn’t matter. I would have liked to get one ‘over-mileage’ run in to guarantee that last 10k in my next marathon, but I’ve got some good consistency and quality into this cycle. With a weeks to go until the Bay of Fundy Marathon, the hay is in the barn and I just need to get to the starting line.
I think the hot run tweaked my heel. I didn’t tape it for that run because I knew the tape would just sweat off. Then with my pace getting destroyed by the heat I ran on it heavy awkwardly and.
I just have to remember to pay attention and not do anything stupid.
And I’ll be fine!
We have a great show for you today. I have an interesting chat about transformation and Zen with Brad Warner who is an actual Zen Master. I like to bring you these non-running, but related conversations to help us think outside the box. As we know from experience, thinking outside the box can help us find ‘the third way’.
In section one I’ll talk about change and the elasticity of human systems. In section two I’ll talk about heat running – not the typical ’10 things to remember’ post but a deeper dive into my experience last weekend running 20 miles in the teeth of it.
Quickly, I had a good question this past week. “How does doing 1600’s at 30 seconds or a minute faster than your goal marathon pace burn in your goal marathon pace? Aren’t those not two, actually three, different paces?”
(Note: For those of you late to this topic, what we’re talking about is a marathon training plan based on 1600 meter repeats at two speeds, the first I call ‘tempo’ is 30ish seconds faster than your goal marathon pace and the second, I call ‘speed’ is 60ish seconds faster than your goal marathon pace. I have discussed this in nauseating detail previously on the podcast and on my blog at www.runrunlive.com
You’ve got a good point there. There are several reasons that you are doing these 1600 repeats at the faster pace and, that when you show up to race it translates very well to your end-to-end marathon goal pace.
Of the two 1600 training paces, I think tempo is more important in burning in your pace. The speed pace helps more with strength and fitness and also if you really need to get faster. You may notice that many of the published intermediate plans don’t have any what I would call ‘speed’ work, they only have some version of tempo work.
When I say ‘pace’ I’m really referring to the whole package of pace, form, mechanics and effort. When you run those 1600’s on the track you are isolating all of this. No hills, no other external influences, so you can focus on form and pace execution. By doing this repetitively you become use to that ‘pace’ that is made up of the form mechanics and effort.
You can’t do these 1600’s at your tempo or speed pace without learning how to relax into the form and mechanics and effort. If you do them with crappy form you won’t be able to hold the pace. And that is what you are burning in. The ability to relax into that pace with machine-like efficiency.
You might think of it as like training with weights and then taking the weights off for the race.
When you get to your goal marathon, because you have burned in the mechanics, they will carry over to your goal marathon pace and it will feel easy. Your goal marathon pace will inherit the efficiencies that your burned in at tempo pace.
Running them at the faster pace means that race pace should feel easy and restful. It also means that if you get sucked into running a couple of the early miles too fast your body knows how to recover quickly when you back off to race pace.
And that, is what I think about that. All I’m saying is try it for a training cycle and then tell me how racing feels.
On with the show.
Section one:
Change and the elasticity of human systems – http://www.runrunlive.com/change-and-the-elasticity-of-human-systems
Featured Interview:
Brad Warner – HardCore Zen, Punk Rock and Monster Movies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608681831/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1608681831&linkCode=as2&tag=hardzen-20
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/there-is-no-god-and-he-is-always-with-you-brad-warner/1114864458?ean=9781608681839
That’s for the new book. All my others can be ordered from the “store” link at hardcorezen.info
I’m attaching the publicity photo I’m currently using. It’s a bit too “nice” for me. But people seem to like it.
http://www.amazon.com/Hardcore-Zen-Monster-Movies-Reality/dp/086171380X
Hardcore Zen is not your typical “Zen” book. Brad Warner, the young punk who grew up to be a Zen master, spares no one — just like Reality itself. This bold new approach to the Why of Zen Buddhism is as strongly grounded in the tradition of Zen as it is utterly revolutionary: Warner’s voice is hilarious, and he calls on the wisdom of everyone from punk and pop culture icons to the Buddha himself to make sure his points come through loud and clear. The subtitle (and the cover!) say it all: there has never been a book like this one.
Section two:
The Anatomy of a hot run. – http://www.runrunlive.com/hot-hot-hot
Outro:
Well I’ll be darned, we’ve made it to the end of another RunRunLive – Episode 3263 is almost in your rearview mirror.
I’m traveling next week and then next weekend, June 23rd, I’m racing again up at the Bay of Fundy Marathon. I feel good. I think it will go well if I get a good day. I’ll need to drive up Saturday during the daylight hours. You don’t want to drive through that part of Maine this time of year at night. It’s migration and mating season for the mega fauna and you just won’t win a high speed interaction between the Camry and a horny moose.
I’ve been talking with Eric and we’re thinking about doing an Ultra relay across the state of Missouri towards the end of October. The plan would be to get a crew of folks and run the 250 miles across the whole state, mostly on the Katy trail. Plans are still being formulated but it would be a low-overhead affair and if you think you can run 2-3 ½ marathons in a row over 3 days shoot me an email and join up.
We are going to call it the Mojo-BigMo.
Since I’ve been running faster workouts I had to find a better solution than the iPhone for listening to music. I resurrected an old 1 Meg Sansa Clip mp3 player. It only holds a couple hundred songs but it’s super light and I don’t have to worry about wrecking it when I’m doing these high-sweat, high intensity runs. I just put it in a baggie and slip it into my shorts pocket.
The reason I bring this up is that there are millions of these cheap 1st generation mp3 players out there on ebay and such. For $5 you can have low-overhead tunes. Just download and install the free version of WinAmp. WinAmp has plugins to read your existing iTunes library – very low overhead.
When I was talking about audiobooks from Librivox last time someone said that Moby Dick is a good one you can get too. Call me Ishmael, but I haven’t listened to it yet. I have been listening to live streamed Grateful Dead concerts that I found hundreds of at Archive.org. They have a playlist file for each concert that you can download. Open the playlist file with iTunes and iTunes will stream the whole concert. It’s awesome for some of the creative work I’m doing in the office this week.
The nice folks over at Spirit of the Marathon sent me a publicity copy of the Spirit of the Marathon II to review. It was pretty good and I’ll see if I can get them on the show for a chat about it. My understanding is that it is opening at theatres nationwide right now.
As you can see, I’ve got enough to keep me busy. Things are good. I can’t complain.
I hope you are enjoying your summer, unless you’re are on the other side of our fair planet, then I hope you’re enjoying your winter.
Until next time I bid you adieu, parting is such sweet sorrow. My the sun shine kindly on your world.
Outro Bumper
Thanks for listening folks I appreciate your support. RunRunLive is a free service for you because I like writing and telling stories.
I also love to meet folks so feel free to reach out to me at Gmail or any of the other social networking sites. I’m CYKTRussell. And as you know that’s Chris-Yellow-King-Tom-Russell with two Esses and two Ell’s.
My Website is http://www.runrunlive.com and most if not all of this content is posted out there. If you want the show notes to magically show up in your inbox when I publish a show in a beautiful HTML wrapper you can subscribe to the mailing list at my site. It’s a useful thing if you are moved by something I say and would like to see if what I wrote is the same thing! It also has all the links to everything and everyone I talk to and about.
Other than that, thank you for your attention, do epic stuff and let me know if I can help.
Ciao
Happy Song – Super Hero
Links for this show
http://www.runrunlive.com/messing-around-with-a-kickstarter-project
Other products from Chris Russell you may be interested in
The Mid-Packer’s Lament
On Audio (Read by the author)
The Mid-Packer’s Guide to the Galaxy
Standard Links:
Contact:
Cyktrussell At gmail and twitter and facebook and youtube
Dial in number for RunRunLive is – 206-339-7804 (to leave an audio message for the show)
Bio
Chris Russell lives and trains in suburban Massachusetts with his family and Border collie Buddy. Chris is the author of “The Mid-Packer’s Lament”, and “The Mid-Packer’s Guide to the Galaxy”, short stories on running, racing, and the human comedy of the mid-pack. Chris writes the Runnerati Blog at www.runnerati.com. Chris’ Podcast, RunRunLive is available on iTunes and at www.runrunlive.com. Chris also writes for CoolRunning.com (Active.com) and is a member of the Squannacook River Runners and the Goon Squad.
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