25 March 2010

Invisible Training

I recently listened to an Endurance Planet podcast featuring Charlie Engle, in which he mentioned hearing once that Michael Wardian practiced "Invisible Training." Wardian gets the majority of his miles in at times that no one else is around, like early in the morning and over lunch, etc. As fatherhood approaches, I've been trying to do the same by getting miles in early, before work. My results have been lackluster. I simply don't like running then, and the whole idea of "training" hasn't been all that fun, either. I pretty much enjoy doing hill repeats occasionally, and mostly just running on trails for as long as time allows. So while I'm trying to "train invisibly," I'm only really finding out that my training has been invisible and non-existent.

Which brings me to this weekend, when I'm running the Trailbreaker Marathon. I ran 3:15 last year at this event and was pretty happy with that time. This year I'm considering anything under 3:20 a success. If I break 3:20 I will reward myself with beer. If I finish in something over 3:20 I will console myself with beer.

I'll be back this weekend with a race report. Promise.

9 comments:

Glaven Q. Heisenberg said...

Real beer? Or invisible beer?

Because you know Teh 'Bride considers that pissy yellow stuff to be "invisible beer" - i.e., not REAL beer. That stuff won't put hair on your vagina, Nic! And about a month ago, Teh 'Bride got me this beer book out of her library and one of the points the authors (there were two of them and they were both skirts and you can BET they had hair ... down there) made repeatedly was that the COLOR of the beer didn't matter if it was BREWED well; i.e., that color does NOT correlate with quality. Which I agree with. And every time they made this point, I'd read the passage out loud to Teh 'B. and await her response.

Which was always:

"Pfffttt!"

Good luck this weekend! If you don't break 3:20, you have to drink wine coolers. And joyRuN gets to HUNT YOU DOWN with the most dangerous weapon she owns - her driver's license.

B. Kramer said...

Invisible beer? You mean, Michelob Ultra?

Go get yourself some celebratory beer this weekend. Cheers!

SteveQ said...

One of the things I've seen with new fathers who run is that they become more focused, just to get the training in. Fewer junk miles, too.

One of my favorite types of beer is the Belgian Trippel (Matt Patten made a nice one last year); it's pale in color and about 10% alcohol - the stealth drunk. Hey, mine's got a hair in it - and it's curly!

Unknown said...

Maybe you should just run for a fun for a while, without signing up for any races? I found I started to love running and training again after I took last year off from racing!

Ace said...

Have a great race! My big board prediction is 2:59 AND beer.

Helen said...

Invisible training = Invisible blogger!!

Hope the beer was good - you surely deserved it for winning your age group!

Probably see you at Chippewa. Save me a beer at the finish...

Glaven Q. Heisenberg said...

Wow, Nic! Congratulations! First in your AG? Pretty impressive! Can I ghost write your race report? Because I know it'll take you till like the baby is born in May to get around to writing it. I would be very respectful when I did it. The opening lines would be:

My name is Nicholas. Geez, why didn't my Dad (i.e., SteveQ) just name me "Dweeb" because Nicholas? What a wiener name! Anyway I just ran a marathon ...

I can't promise I would be able to continue at such a respectful level for the whole report (it'll end up checking in at roughly 10,000 words, almost a third of them actually necessary for the story), but it would be something to shoot for.

Let me know.

I promise not to mention the Ladies' Long Sleeve Evening Gloves*.
____
* Except in footnotes.

SteveQ said...

Nice job at TB!

Could you put back the section with links to bloggers you'd like to run with? I was using it as a shortcut.

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