I have a friend who is going to try for a PR at a 7.5 mile race tomorrow. I don’t like running in the cold particularly. But I thought it could be fun. If I ran it as a race, I would probably try to run it at a 7:30 pace. Maybe even faster if I did walk breaks each mile. But my friend is going to try to run it at a 10:00 pace. She says she would be happy with a 10:30 pace.
I used the FIRST 3:30 schedule when training for the Las Vegas Marathon. It radically increased my speed, and I finished in 3:36:30. That’s just 5 1/2 minutes short of qualifying for the Boston Marathon. I am going to try again in 2 1/2 months at the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach, VA. But I want to hedge my bets a little bit. So I decided to use a more aggressive training schedule. The Furman FIRST schedule worked vey well for me. But I decided to use the 3:15 schedule. I don’t plan to run the marathon in 3:15, or even attempt to. I will probably run again at 8:00 pace, and try to hold it, and maybe finish with a little bit of a kick. Or I maybe target a 3:25 marathon. But I figure the faster training my give me a little more room to finish the marathon, and hit my 3:30 goal time.
Having missed qualifying for the Boston Marathon, I looked hard for my next race. I originally started looking for something around May/June. I ran the Buffalo Marathon this year, and it was a good bet, though the course is relatively uninteresting. But it is flat and probably would be a fast course.
I bought a Horizon T900 treadmill at Dick’s Sporting Goods on black friday. I got it for about $1000, and paid an extra $200 for extended warranty. I also paid to have it delivered and assembled. Now some of the things that I don’t like about the Horizon. The cup holders suck. Actually they are not cupholders so much as bottle rests. They are angled, and the bottle rests in it. A cup or can would be likely to spill, since the holder is angled. The treadmill comes up to speed too slowly. If I am going to run a quarter mile repeat at around 5:48 pace, the treadmill takes about the first 1/10th of a mile to reach full speed. So the first .10 miles is run slower than 5:48 pace, and only the the last .15 miles is actually run at 5:48 pace. The Proform which had a smaller motor, came up to speed faster. The treadmill resets after 5 minutes of inactivity. If I am doing a long training run, I might take a break to go to the restroom, or whatever. By the time I get back, the Horizon has reset, and lost all the info about how many miles I have already ran. This is annoying. The Proform waited for 30 minutes or more before resetting. The Horizon displays pace as minutes. Not minutes and seconds, only minutes. So if I am running as a 7:30 pace, it will display pace as 7.50. This is a pain since my training schedules have me running at paces like 6:20, 7:26, 5:48. So I have to pull out a calculator to do the conversions. The lower end Profrom displayed pace as minutes and seconds as would make sense. Horizon was just stupid on this point. I emailed Horizon to find out if I could tweak a setting and maybe fix some of these issues. I go an email saying they would respond in 2 business days. They didn’t. I called them, and asked them directly. The guy told me no, that I couldn’t change any of these. I find it hard to believe that the higher end Horizon treadmill is inferior in these functions to the lower end Proform!
Last night I ran my toughest intervals yet! I switched from the FIRST 3:30 schedule, to the FIRST 3:15 schedule. I had to cheat to get through them. Instead of doing a 200m rest interval, I took a 2-3 minute rest between each one to catch my breath!!! And I was literally gasping for breath! My throat is still a little sore as it dried out on the first interval. I warmed up with an easy mile at 10:00 pace. All but one of these intervals were done at a faster pace than my old treadmill would even do! I am pretty sure I could run a mile at 6:00 pace though. I would like to run a 5 minute mile some day just to say I did it.
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