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Running After the Age of Fifty – A blog by Paul Jurasin

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Three Weeks to Go – Running the Rogue River Trail

0418150937~2With just 3 weeks to go before my wife Becky and my 3 day, 40 mile run down the Rogue River Trail in Oregon, it’s time to adjust our training strategy.  During the week while we’re working, we’ve been continuing a steady dose of daily short runs with one mid-week, mid length run of about 5 miles.  On weekends, we’ve been doing at least one long, very difficult run of about 14-15 miles on technical terrain and with 1500 – 2500 feet of elevation gain followed by a 9 or 10 mile run on the second weekend day.  This is great training, but we’re finding that the hard run is causing enough strain that the second run on the weekend is lacking in quality because we’re pretty beat up.  This level of training would probably have been OK in our 20s but I have to remind myself that we’re in our 50s.  Starting this weekend an adjustment is in order.

We will begin doing a long but easy run on Saturday of about 3 hours (roughly 15 miles) followed by another 2 hour easy run on Sunday.  The concept behind this change is that the time we spend on our feet during the long run will benefit our endurance without causing the physical damage to our bodies of the technical terrain with lots of climbing and descending.  The 2 hour Sunday will run will also give us a chance to practice running on slightly tired legs which will be likely on the 2nd and 3rd day of the Rogue River Run.  We also need some additional nutritional practice with gels during the run.   At this point Becky tends to use one gel every 45 minutes to keep her energy up while I either have one gel and the start or none at all.  Experimenting with more and less calories will help us to refine to the optimal level.  Everyone responds differently to training and nutrition so it’s not expected that we will both arrive at the same optimal levels.

Updates to come in a week or two!

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Preparing for a Multi-Day Running Vacation

Earlier this year when it was time to plan a vacation for the summer, my wife, Becky, and I decided to do something different.

Trail Running
California Trail Running

It’s something we do all the time – trail running – yet never in this format.  We decided to sign up for a multi-day trail running trip down the Rogue River trail in Oregon.   The concept is that all we do is run about 15 miles per day for 3 days while all of our gear, tents and food is taken down the river in a raft where it meets us at appropriate locations each day.  In addition, the running and river guides setup the tents and cook the food.  For a trail runner this sounds like heaven!  We booked our trip with Momentum River Expeditions  based mostly on reviews and the trip guide.  The guide for our trip is Jenn Shelton of the book “Born to Run” fame in addition to having the record for fastest female time for 100 miles in the U.S.  To enhance the experience we managed to convince a couple of our friends from Colorado to join us.

Being that both Becky and I are in the 50+ age range, we’re attempting to train such that we are in good enough shape to complete the 40 or so mile run comfortably without training so much that we get burned out or injured.  We’ve both started out with a decent base of being able to run 10-15 miles easily.  The trick is to be able to do it for 3 days in a row.  In general, our plan is to slowly increase our weekly mileage with weekend back to back runs increasing to 12-15 miles each with weekly totals of approximately 35 miles.  We’re also doing a mid-week longer run.   So far so good.  We’re about 6 weeks into the training plan and feeling good!

More updates to come.

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Trail Review – Johnson Ranch to Irish Hills

We’ve been doing a lot of trail running in the past few months.  My wife and I try to find a new trail to run as often as possible and have been succeeding in finding at least one new trail every couple of weeks.  Of course, this can’t last forever.  Eventually, we will have run most of the trails near our home and will have to drive continually farther away to continue to get the new trail input.  That’s OK. It’s a good reason to get out and explore.

I always take photos on our trail running adventures and while I have done trail reviews before, I recently realized that doing this on a more regular basis might help others to try out some of the trails we’ve discovered without so much trial and error.

Let’s start with today’s (3/28/2015) run:

Trail Location:  San Luis Obispo, CA

Trail:  Johnson Ranch to Irish Hills

Distance: 5.0 miles

Elevation: Minimum 93 feet, Maximum 643 feet

Surface: Packed dirt, rocks, double and single track

Summary:  This is a scenic, hilly trail with a combination of single and double track.  There is significant foot and bicycle traffic on the trail at peak times of the day.  As always, traffic becomes thinner as you get farther from the trail heads.  I highly recommend this trail if you don’t mind hills.

Photos:

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Back to the Roads – Tucson Marathon

ImageFall is well underway and that means the marathon bug has hit me again.  Even though I can’t seem to stop the continuous forward march of aging, it hasn’t yet reduced my desire for long distance running.  Last year at about this time, while Hurricane Sandy was finishing up the devastation she caused on the eastern seaboard, I was packing for what was to be the canceled New York City Marathon.   It took me nearly six months before I considered another long distance race but in August I did, in fact, commit to training for another marathon.  The Tucson Marathon on December 8th is the new goal.  My old Colorado training buddy has recently moved to Tucson so a marathon in the Southwest is a logical choice.  Since we’re planing to run the race together, there’s some built-in competitive incentive to keep the training up.

My intermediate training goal was to complete the City to the Sea Half Marathon in San Luis Obispo, California in early October.  Despite a rapid increase in training distances, the race was a success with a finish 10 minutes ahead of expected.  Even though I had some success in the race, I did nearly everything wrong in preparation.  I went from a six mile long run to a 1Image2 mile long run over a 4 week period.  I bought a new pair of running shoes the day before the race and ran the half marathon in them without ever running in them before.  I didn’t ingest any nutrition, gels or otherwise, during the race.  All bad things – and I knew it.  Fortunately it all worked out well despite myself – but that was a half marathon.  I can’t power my way through a full marathon without much more careful planning and execution.  The distance is too long and the effort is too hard to not be prepared.  It’s been 18 years since I ran the Chicago Marathon in 1995 and I’m a lot older now.  I should have much more experience behind me now and know how my body responds to the stress of training.  One of the things I plan to do is to keep at least half of my long run mileage on trails to reduce the impact of training on pavement.  In theory, this will serve me well.  We’ll see!

Stay tuned – I’ll write about how the training progresses and how the results of the preparation unfold.

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Over 50? How often can you run?

Although everyone is different, one of the primary things I’ve noticed as I get older is that I need more recovery time after a run to keep performing at a high level. I could go out and do detailed research on why that is, but for today I’ll just talk about personal experience.2012-04-06 15.31.14

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a 3-5 day per week runner with a long run and maybe a speed or track workout thrown in. This seemed to work well. Then back in November and December I decided to do an experiment and run every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas to see how that felt. I didn’t do any longer than usual runs. In fact, I ran shorter than normal on many days as my goal was only to run at least one mile every day. I extended my everyday run streak to 40 days and noticed progressive changes as the days piled up.  The first thing was that it began to take more time to warm up and feel loose.  The standard 7 or 8 minutes turned into 10 to 15 minutes.   On some days, I only felt loose for the last few minutes.  Also, as I got nearer to the end of my streak, I became continually slower and my legs never felt good.

Finally when the streak ended, I took about a week off from running.  My first run back was amazing!  My legs felt light and I was running minutes per mile faster than at the end of the streak.  The difference was dramatic.  It was obvious that to remain a runner in a sustainable way, a certain amount of rest and recovery time between runs, no matter how short, is needed.  My new experiment is to determine how much recovery time is optimal.  To little will be detrimental to performance and too much won’t provide enough activity to remain fit.  The fine tuning will continue forever, I expect…

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Road Racing in Winter – Why?

In the cold, wet, dark, snowy winter months when most rational people stay inside or get their exercise in a gym, many runners keep running and racing outside.  In this part of the country, Colorado, there are road races to run on nearly every weekend of the year.  In the winter months of December through March, almost all races are on roads versus trail because of the poor trail conditions due to snow, mud and ice.  The roads, for the most part, are clear and dry for a good portion of the winter in the Denver area.  But, there are the occasional snowstorms that dump several inches of snow on the city usually followed by warmer, melting days resulting in clear running within a week after any storm.   These snow and melt days are a problem.  They make the roads and paths slushy and then icy; a bad combination for outdoor running.

There are a multitude of reasons that racing in the winter is less than optimal.  Training is erratic due to uncertain weather and road conditions.  Plans have to be changed because the track becomes snow covered the night before speed work is scheduled.  Roads and sidewalks become icy making running treacherous.  Any form of consistency is non-existent.  Running on the treadmill in the gym is an alternative which I have come to appreciate, but it’s not the same as an outside run.

With that dreary picture of winter running, why do people still do it?  Well, there are some advantages.  This is the time of year to set the bar for the upcoming year.  Scheduling a 5K or 10K in January or February encourages us to keep our fitness level up.  After all, no one wants a dismal race performance even though our training level might be lower than in warmer months.  That motivation carries us through to the time of better weather conditions and when the trails become runnable  for trail runners.  Another positive aspect of winter running is the development of mental toughness that can be used during training and racing later in the year.  The resolve to get out and train when it’s cold and dark makes increasing our pace a bit during warm weather seem much easier.

Give it a try. Train for and run a race in the winter.  You’ll get the feeling that you and the other participants are conquering a great obstacle that others have not.

10 degrees with fog this morning – guess I better get out and run!

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