Michael: Benchmarks

The bluish white skies
Of a feeble sun are cold
And threaten more rain.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

After a few years of running 50ks to change it up it’s either try to go longer or go shorter and try to go faster. As I’ll be 60 next year, for both personal pleasure and for long term health reasons, I feel it would be wiser to go initially go shorter.

The thinking behind this is that speed decreases with age more rapidly than endurance, so why not maximize speed first? That should also have the carry over benefit of making future longer efforts faster as well as the efficiency gained through speed should transfer to a more economic long run. We’ll see how all this theory plays out in the next couple of years.

Next year I’d like to run the Bull Dog 25k under 2:10, the Mt. Baldy 7.5 mile hill climb under 1:40, a flat 5k under 19, a flat half marathon under 1:25, a mile under 5:30, and I’d like to qualify for the World Championships in a standard distance Duathlon in my age group.

Of all of those, it’s the half marathon and mile goal that will be the most difficult to accomplish.

Why?

For one, I haven’t ran those races in years and have no idea how those numbers feel any more. At this stage it may not even be a matter of pushing through the discomfort of training. It may be that the opportunity to retain the leg turnover necessary to achieve those times have long drained out of whatever fast twitch fibers I have left.

But that’s what goals and training are all about. So lets look at what needs to be done and see if I can do it.

I’ve always thought that Ed Whitlock’s 3 hour marathon at age 70 would be a reasonable future goal, but the future may be now. If I can’t even run a half marathon in under 1:30 at age 60 it would take divine intervention to gain speed and be able to surpass his mark at 70.