I have to get serious about what they call the LSD run. This does not refer to dropping acid and marveling at chord changes in Pink Floyd albums (that would probably be an easier way to spend 4 hours and might actually entail less risk of injury or long term damage than running a marathon...) but is in fact the staple of marathon training. It refers to your once-a-week Long Slow Distance run. For this one, you don't worry about pace, but the goal is to build endurance; this is how you train your body to go the distance. You can add speed later.
One of my favorite endurance songs:
Cake Going the Distance
Going the distance needs work, as my spectacularly beautiful but also spectacularly hilly half marathon along the French Riveria last weekend showed me. And this was only HALF the distance I need to run in April. So all about the acid, I mean LSD runs now and have 27K (17 miles) on the books for this weekend, which will be the farthest I've ever run before.
The French Riveria (Côte d'Azur) is out of control beautiful, by the way, and during the entire race, I kept thinking, I can't believe I'm running a half marathon here, of all the places in the world! I'm just a little nobody (as opposed to being Brigitte Bardot!) and I get to do this! Grateful to have the opportunity to run with my best friend in a beautful and legendary place.
So to stop gushing about my incredible fortune (or crazy destination run planning is more like it!) and to get back to training, I lied a little, we are trying to add some speed now rather than later, because we are a tri team and some of the althletic Super Friends want to do it in crazy fast times like 3 hours, but I know the distance runs are the most important training right now. Track intervals are, however, also on the training plan and a fun change from plodding along at a steady pace waiting for the old Garmin to go from 12 to 13 miles. Did track intervals with the tri team last night and it was brilliant, although the old slender but shapely legs (ha!) are way tired today because of it.
At our track sessions, we're working on Yassos-- this is another strange term pronounced 'Yah-ssous,' and it's a marathon training exericse named for Bart Yasso, head, founder, guru-in-chief (not sure of exact title) of Runners' World Magazine. You can either use it to predict your marathon time or train for a target time, we're doing the latter. You essentially have to run around a track twice (so 800 meters) and how fast you do it depends on your target marathon time. Je vous explique (French people are always announcing that they'll explain things to you, or even worse, asking the rhetorical question 'why?' and then proceding to answer it). I want to do my marathon in 4 hours (it's my first one, ok? I mainly just don't want to destroy any joints or lose any toenails-- I'm horrified by what distance runners tell me about their toenails; it's like they just consider doing a marathon and half their toenails fall off!), so I have to run my 800 meters in 4 minutes (the rule is convert hours to minutes, like if you want at 3:30 marathon, you should be able to do your 800s in 3 and a half minutes). After you do your target fast time for your fast 800, then you jog to recover for the same amount of time (so 4 min for me), then you do your fast 800 again, wash, rinse, repeat. We did 7 repeats last night, which I was super pleased with. You should be able to do 12 and when you're capable of that and consistently hitting 4 min for every single fast 800, you should hit your marathon target time of 4 hours (if you're me, anyway). For this exercise, you need a track, a stopwatch and probably a bunch of friends to help motivate you to run fast.
So to recap, what have we learned today? (I'm a teacher, if you can't tell.) That LSD runs are important and have nothing to do with recreational drugs (unless you count endorphins!) and that I have to start being religious about doing them and they'll need to be very long indeed (longest on program so far is 35K or 22 miles). And that track is fun and Yassos, or running 800-meter repeats, are supposed to be the secret to hitting your target marathon time. Other things to mention as I figure them out: will share marathon/triathlon training plan once athletic Super Friends ok it and I also have to figure out what to eat during long runs and the marathon itself. The world of sports gels beckons.
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