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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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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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What are you reading? Running or otherwise…

What people read says much about them.  It’s one of those things that’s not significantly influenced by others.  It’s an individual preference that, when looked at as a whole, provides some insight into the thinking of the person.   In general, especially from a periodical point of view, I think people read about topics that are parallel to their own views.  They want to learn more about and see what other people with the same interests have to say.  I know this applies to me.

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California Trail Running

My magazine subscriptions are few but the ones (ok, one) that I  pay for, I’m very loyal to.  I’ve had a subscription to Runners World for many years and have no plan to end it anytime soon.  Runners World is the core magazine for runners.  It contains information about food, special interest, real people, training, shoes and various other topics.  Occasionally, I’ll think it has too much information for beginning runners, but the other information is just too good for me to stop reading.  It’s the one magazine I read from cover to cover every month.

A long time runner friend recently purchased a subscription to Trail Runner magazine for me.  In the past several years, I have been doing predominantly trail running and really enjoy the relative solitude of being off road.  A big positive for Trail Runner is that it focuses less on beginner runners and more on places and trail races.  I can see it becoming another magazine that I will move into my every month reading list.

If you’ve ever been in an airport about to board a several hour flight and are looking for a good read in the newstand, what do you buy?  You’ve already got your “go to” magazines in your bag and are looking for something else…  I know I tend to migrate to the either the business or science sections.   Scientific American is always good to learn something new.  But, I have to be awake to pay attention to this one.  Though I love the magazine and the topics it covers, sometimes I don’t want to think so much on an airplane.  The Economist is another favorite of mine but again – I need to be awake to read this one.  My default if I want general information without needing to put much effort into it is USA Today.  The articles are general and it keeps me up to date on current events.

What does this say about me – Runners World, Trail Runner, Scientific American, Economist and USA Today?  Not sure, but maybe it says something that none of these magazines have anything to do with my what my every day job is.  I wonder if I’m an anomaly or mainstream from that point of view.

 

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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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