Ragnar relay to Cape Cod

This post (and many other posts) is long overdue. This are these long distance relay races called "Ragnars" and this past May, there was one happening from Hull, Massachusetts to Cape Cod. This being a race and also being 200-ish miles long meant that our relay team of 12 runners would be mobile for nearly 24 hours. Our team was a combination of astronomers, members of my running club, and a whole bunch of Ragnar relay veterans, who came up with the team name "Sweaty Lunatics" (this event actually encourages this sort of eccentric attitude--our team name was relatively tame compared to some of the other ones...)

Fortunately, we were split into two vans, which allowed us to drive ahead to the hand-off points along the course and get (some) sleep as the other half of the team ran to catch up. I personally got to run at night in a dark forest (that was my favorite, actually), then the next morning along a rail trail, and then the last leg of the relay along the Cape. That last section was rainy, but it was a lot of fun in spite of that. 

One quick note on the Boston Marathon: I had a foot injury in March that didn't entirely prevent me from running, but was bad enough that I opted out of jogging through the marathon this year. I would rather not be out of running for the rest of the year and not be able to compete in the race. My foot was feeling all better by May and now I'm working on getting fit for my next marathon.

Baystate marathon and the Assault on Mt. Hood

I'm still working out the details in the whole time management thing with grad school and running, but I think I made some progress this year (with the help of CRC, of course).

My training for the Baystate marathon at the end of October got me a 2 minute PR. My finishing time of 2 hours 54 minutes was about 5-6 minutes slower than I anticipated based on my training, but I think most of the time loss came due to dehydration in the last 5 miles or so. I'll go for sub-2:50 next April in Boston (when it hopefully won't be nearly 70F towards the end of the race).

Earlier in December, I ran with CRC in a race called the Assault on Mt. Hood. It's a race on a golf course that varies its course each year and the prizes include nutcrackers. The prizes alone make the race worth running, but we got a bonus this year: a snow storm during the race.

The snow left me with a nice crown of frost atop my hair and our team (CRC's Partridge in a Pear tree) won first place!

I'm hoping to run more shorter distance races like Mt. Hood before competing in Boston next April.

:^)

Race updates and marathon training

It has been awhile since my last update. I've been managing a productive summer as far as marathon training (for the Baystate Marathon in October) goes by incorporating in a few races. About 3 weeks after the Martha's Vineyard marathon, I ran a leg in my running team's 26 x 1 mile relay. What little training I did (as in none at all) between the end of the marathon and the relay resulted in a 5-minute mile, which isn't my fastest, but I was more focused on just enjoying the event.

After the 26 x 1 mile relay.

In July, we raced a 5K that's part of the Boston Summer Series. I went into this race (my first 5K in 14 months) with a similar mentality to the relay--just to enjoy it. I ended up finishing in 16:33, which was faster than I was during my freshman year in college, so that was a pleasant surprise. It's races like these that help me understand what long-term, year-round training can do for one's fitness.

Earlier this month, we drove north to Rockport, MA to compete in the Triple Threat mile, 5K, and half-marathon back-to-back races. I only ran the 5K, looking for a PR and a good run to enhance my marathon training. The 5K course was hilly and had some great views of the New England oceanside. I was glad to have matched my time from the summer series race here because that once again provided some tangible evidence that my fitness was improving.

The 5K finished at the Triple Threat race in Rockport, MA.

I'll probably do another race or two before the marathon comes around in October.

:^)

Martha's Vineyard marathon

I ran my third marathon about a week ago. I and 3 other students from the astronomy department went to an island in Massachusetts called Martha's Vineyard. The race started somewhere in the center of the island and went along the beach for the last 4 miles. I ended up finishing the race in under 3 hours, but about 3 minutes slower than my PR. The training I did for this marathon was mostly during the winter and I had several days where the cold (-10C on below) would cause me to cancel a few runs. Later this year I'll do one more marathon and train for something closer to 2:50:00. With the experience of 3 marathons and warmer weather training, I think that's a reasonable yet still challenging goal. 

That's one thing I like about running; it's a sport where you can compete against your own times as a means to improve what you're capable of.

The island itself was nice and quiet and had a lot of exciting Disneyland-esque houses. Most of these are vacation homes and were empty, which added a slightly eerie feel to the town at times.

There was also a nice beach (something I don't think I've seen since I was at Santa Cruz)!

:^)

Marathon splits vs. Radial velocity signal of an exoplanet

This is sort of a mini-post to follow up my Clarence DeMar marathon post. I saved each of my mile splits from my race on my watch and decided that I wanted to present them in x-y axis form:

Yes, I stopped after 5K into the race to use a porta-potty and yes, there was a
man standing in front of his home blasting Star Wars music during mile 14.

Take away point: I started the race too fast and my average pace is comparable to the radial velocity signal of a Neptune-sized planet orbiting 4 times closer to the Sun than Mercury does. The radial velocity signal is a measurement of the pull of the planet (due to gravity) on the star. It looks like this. 

When you put things in terms of giant planets, 4 meters per second seems more impressive.

:^)

The 2016 Clarence DeMar Marathon

I ran a marathon in September. It was the Clarence DeMar marathon in New Hampshire and it started at 8:00am in some town I had never heard of with the temperature at 4C (that means cold for my fellow Americans of the Fahrenheit persuasion). I had been training for this race for about 12 weeks and I felt pretty good about meeting my goal of qualifying for the Boston marathon, which meant finishing 26.2 miles in under 3 hours 5 minutes. I feel like the training is something that is overlooked or just under appreciated sometimes despite that being at least 50% of the total effort that goes into the marathon.

I ended up finishing the marathon in 2 hours 56 minutes 22 seconds:

This was also a 23 minute improvement and personal best from my first marathon in November 2015. I think the biggest difference between these two races was the extra 4 weeks of training I had for my second marathon over the first one. Endurance running in general is about consistency and for the marathon, that means training consistently for many weeks before a race. I had a solid daily training schedule for both of my marathons, but I was unable to give myself enough time over a long term period to prepare for it. This was made very obvious to me in the last 3 miles of both races.

In my first marathon, I hit the "wall" at mile 23 and it took me another 30-40 minutes to finish the race. I was fully aware of my surroundings and knew more or less what was happening, but I couldn't even will myself into running until the very last few minutes of the race. This is in contrast to my second marathon where I started feeling particularly fatigued around mile 23 or 24, but I was nowhere near the same broken-down state as I was in my first race.

Of course, the second race benefited from the experience of the first as well as a few other motivating factors I haven't mentioned yet like Clark the cat and some trophies from a 5K back in May 2016:

Clark lives with another graduate student in the astronomy department. We stayed at his house (the grad student's, but I suppose it was Clark's house too) the night before the Clarence DeMar marathon and Clark was kind enough to keep us all company.

Just before I formally started training for my second marathon, I did a sort of "rust buster" 5K. I was part-way treating it as a work out, but I ended up crossing the finish line before anyone else and receiving these two trophies.

On the left is a picture of me running back home with them.

This is also why I prefer medals. Those trophies were heavy.

So between the 5K at very start of my training up until the night before the race, I found a few small things to keep me motivated. Hopefully being on the front page of the Clarence DeMar marathon webpage will serve as some more motivation for all the training and races I do in the future.

:^)

Maintaining Mileage with some Thermodynamics

Since my 22nd birthday, I've run just over 1200 miles with my first marathon last November included in that somewhere. I've noticed that various treadmills and my GPS watch tell me that I use about 110 Calories per mile. That means I've used around 100,000 dietary calories which roughly translates into 500 megajoules of energy over those 1200 miles. That (according to Wolfram Alpha) is over 10 times the amount of food energy Michael Phelps consumed per day while training for the Olympics.

It's also 42 times the kinetic energy of a 40 ton semi-trailer truck moving at 60mph. My favorite comparison I found while doing this is that for an instant, that 40 ton truck has the same amount of energy as my iPhone will use in one year.

 I promise I have a life and didn't spend more than 30 minutes doing this...

I wonder how much of the energy I used actually went into moving my arms and legs and how much went into heat. As I wonder that, I'll be slowly increasing my weekly mileage in preparation for another marathon sometime this fall.

:^)