Episode 5-513 – Baselining Race Times with Eric
- Podcast link -> https://shows.acast.com/runrunlive
- Buy a book -> https://booklocker.com/books/13731.html
- Amazon -> https://www.amazon.com/After-Apocalypse-Story-Pandemic-Survival/dp/0977234207
Hello my running friends. And welcome to episode 5-513 of the RunRunLive Podcast. Today we have a chat with our friend Eric Buckley about how to baseline your racing fitness when you are in a new season of life. But the same would apply to anyone beginning a new structured training program or coming back from an injury. You wonder, ‘Where do I start?’ Well today we are going to answer that question.
Or at least give it a good chewing over.
In section one I’ll go deeper into this baselining topic and how I’ve been working through it myself.
In section two I’m going to give you some book reviews, because I have been consuming so many books, I need to celebrate some of them and clear my desk.
In the outro I’ll talk through my recent training, what I have learned and how I’m using that to set new goals.
I’ll also revisit my summer goal list.
It is about to switch to Summer in New England. We’ve had 14 straight weekends of rain. It has been consistently cool. Which is great for running but not some much for my tomatoes.
But later this week it is going shift into the 90’s and we’ll get our first real blast of summer. Which means I’m going to need to shift my workouts to as early in the morning as I can stomach.
Ollie the Collie is doing well. He hates the heat. Especially if I’m doing road work on the rail trail. Since we last talked, he pulled something on one of our long runs, and was limping, so he had to sit out for a few days, but he’s back at it now.
Two days in a row he’s found some poop on the trail during our lunchtime walks in the forest, and he thinks it’s a grand idea to roll in it.
I have been forced to give him a bath two days in a row.
Bathing a semi-feral-neurotic border collie is not the simplest activity. I do it in the Jacuzzi of our master bedroom. Which, sadly, or ironically, is the only thing we use the jacuzzi for these days.
He’s not thrilled with it, but it’s starting to become such a part of our routine that he’ll jump into the jacuzzi on demand now. Then I strip down, get in with him, pour water over him, soap him up, rinses and scrub, then drain the now hair-choked jacuzzi and towel him off. Then I wipe up all the hair and take a shower myself.
He’s got such a thick undercoat it takes days for him to dry, especially now that it’s getting humid.
I, on the other hand, have so little hair it doesn’t need to be dried at all.
On with the show!
Section One – On baselining your pace and time goals
Featured Interview – Eric Buckley
Eric was a member of the original running boom, taking up the sport at age nine the day Frank Shorter won the Olympic marathon. He switched to cycling in High School, for which his build is better suited, but never lost his love for running. After retiring from cycling at age 30, he became interested in ultra distances and has been running marathons and ultras ever since.
He is currently raising funds for Cancer Research via Pedal the Cause.
Section Two: Two books about the Moon
Outro
Ok my friends, you have baselined yourself to the end of another RunRunLive Podcast, Episode 5-513, set in concrete and hardening.
My training has been going marginally well. Actually kind of awful. I have tweaked my back twice in the last few weeks. First when I was doing some side lunges, then two weeks later when I was moving soil for my wife, Each incident takes a solid 2 weeks to heal and keeps me from hitting workouts.
With my recent intensity and distance increase my knee is a bit achy as well. And to make matters worse, my ‘pre-retirement-commercial-activity’ (which I used to refer to as ‘my real job’) got a bit busy and stressful at the same time sucking my energy like a great corporate succubus. Andall this is floating on a low background hum of IRL requirements things that can’t be avoided.
You folks know this, but it’s hard, psychologically, when you’ve got a lot of stress and your training isn’t going as well as you like. That training is a lifeline through the other streams of your life and a you rely on it. So when it is faltering you develop a bit of melancholy.
Melancholy is a great word. Comes to us from those happy-go-lucky Greeks. It is a literal translation. ‘Melan’ means black, ‘choly’ is bile. So Melancholy is ‘black bile’. It goes back to the belief that your health was determined by the balance of the four humors and when you started acting depressed you were out of balance.
But – nothing couple of happy leeches and a little blood-letting can’t cure, but, alas, as much as I love a good blood-letting session, I primarily depend on exercise to hold off the melancholia.
So I promised I’d update on my summer goals. Well I’m still noodling on whether I have the juice to run a decent marathon in September given my baselining. I may back off my time goals a little but I’ll still show up and see what I can do. That’s my first goal. That race is in 12 weeks.
I came up with a reading goal. I’m going to read 12 books in the 12 weeks leading up to the race.
That’s 2.
For number 3 I need to get back to my book project because I have, after a 5-year journey completed all 5 seasons of my apocalypse podcast. So – some sort of progress on that, but I haven’t quantified it yet.
I’m going to add one more ill-defined goal of helping my kids somehow, because they are both going through some busy times in their lives.
I’ll tell you a couple stories to take you out. I have had a gentleman who has been using my book from 2015, “MarathonBQ – how to qualify for Boston with a full time job and a family” emailing me over the last year asking questions. I did my best to answer them.
I got an email from him this morning saying he had taken 42 minutes off his marathon PR in his last race. Holy cow! Yeah. If you can handle the load, it works.
And, finally the ‘old guy feel good’ story of the week. I was walking into the market yesterday from the parking lot. I look up and the young lady (young compared to me) coming in the opposite direction has a big smile and is looking at ME. I look around to see who she is really looking at, but no, it’s me, and I wonder what is going on. As she approaches, she smiles and says, “I love your Doom shirt!” Turns out I was wearing a T-shirt with graphics from the old 90’s first person shooter Doom on it.
IDKFA
That kind of thing makes me happy.
And I’ll see you out there.
Buy a book -> https://booklocker.com/books/13731.html
Amazon -> https://www.amazon.com/After-Apocalypse-Story-Pandemic-Survival/dp/0977234207
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