Feb 20 – Mulholland Fireroad, Topanga
Feb 20. 20.06 miles, 2668 feet ascent, Mulholland Fireroad, Topanga. Woke up this morning and there was snow in the mountains. Thought about it…and then opted for trusty Topanga instead. Good run. Cold, and windy in spots. 2 loops along the Mulholland fireroad from the Nike missile thing to I’m not exactly sure where, except that I pick it up in the middle; Nike missile and I’m-not-exactly-sure-where are the end points.
First stop at the Nike Missile whatever-it-is (I guess once upon a time they had missiles there, or made them, or something), and a guy approached me. He was out to run 50K today. Next week, or maybe two weeks from now, he is running a 100K. He’s run a few 100 milers. He had a Human Propulsion Hydration pack. He said all the pros use them. He looked at my jacket and asked me if I was cold. He said I need to run more, and that will take care of the cold business. He was wearing brand new road shoes. He was slightly mentally challenged, I think is the proper way of saying it nowadays. He said he’d been running a lot today and was tired. The implication was that he wanted to stop, but couldn’t, ’cause he wasn’t done yet, and so he was going to soldier on, happily. It looked as though he’d made a decision to be happy no matter what. Maybe it’s simpler that way. It seems like a good strategy. There’s a lot to be said for simplicity.
I have a bad habit of winging it when I do these runs. This is probably not a good idea. Today I ate a banana before the run and had a single Hammer Gel at the mid point. That’s not really adequate nutrition for a 4 hour, 20 mile, 2,668-feet-of-climbing run. Grabbing whatever’s in my bag and sticking it in my pocket is not really the way to go. More planning is probably called for. That or having more stuff laying around to stick in my pockets.
I was tired when I was done. And hungry.
You wear a jacket? I think I wore a long-sleeved shirt exactly once in January, and that was only because I ran before 7am. I like that guy’s perspective, but I think he’s probably wrong about being cold. Being Canadian, I’m obligated to chime in. Running more doesn’t help. Running in temps colder than what’s average for your climate helps.
In the fall, 40ºF feels cold until we get a few days in the 30s. When the cold snap passes, 40º is pretty comfortable. In the winter, 25º is numbing until we get a week in the ‘teens. When the temperature gets back to normal, my hands are all of a sudden acclimated. It’s the same deal every year. I think if last Sunday was one of the coldest days of the year in LA, there’s no way you’ll get used to it unless you take a week’s vacation to go snowboarding.
You’re from Canada. I’m from North Africa. I consider anything below 55 to be cold, and anything below 40 to border on a problem. My legs can take the cold, but I need to keep my core warm. So yeah, I wear a light windbreaker style jacket. Also very helpful when it’s raining, which it did on Sat, and which it threatened to on Sun. On days like that I play it safe.
I wear this thing: http://www.mizunorunning.com/running/products/mens-wp-elixir-jacket It might be one of my best purchases yet.
The reason I consider anything below 55 to be cold is that it very seldom gets below 55 here. I don’t think I’ve been in weather below 40 but once in the last 20 years – a February trip to NYC in ’95
While true, I think it has more to do with my being a Torontonian, and you an Angeleno. Even so, neither being Canadian nor Torontonian insulated me from the first run I had here last week at 40º when I’d been running in Santa Barbara in the 60s. That felt cold, meanwhile my running pals were stripping down and taunting me.
At 50º or above, I prefer to to be rained on than steam in my own sweat, so no jacket for me. I might make an exception if I’m supposed to be out for more than 2.5h in rain+wind. Long runs make me colder, and I think that has more to do with being human than Canadian or North African. My working theory is the body simply conserves energy by reducing blood flow to non-critical extremities when fuel gets low. I’ve been trying to force adaptation for over 10 years now — I don’t expect it will help to run more.
For trails, I agree it’s better to be safe. I take a packable shell if it looks like rain just because you can never be sure about conditions in the mountains. That, and I’m prone to wandering around lost. Mine’s an old vintage but they still produce it: http://www.patagonia.com/us/product/patagonia-womens-houdini-full-zip-jacket?p=24027-0-506 I have a stretch soft shell like yours too, but this one is lighter, keeps the wet out, and squishes into its own pocket down to the size of two Clif bars. I’ve never actually had to open it in SoCal. Obviously, I need to run in the mountains longer and more often!
I don’t mind sweat. I’m used to it. And the winter storm rains here are cold, at least to me. Combine that with the wind and I’m in trouble. I’m better in heat than I am in cold.
Speaking of cold, it’s expected to snow as low as 1000 feet this weekend, which could mean snow on most of my running trails, provided I can get to them…
There’s another thing I really like about the jacket, and that’s the pockets. I’ll often wear it on days when I could easily go without because I much prefer pockets to wearing a belt to hold stuff. I just don’t have sufficient hips for a belt, so I need to tighten it to the point of discomfort or else it slides off.
There are other options. A hydration pack has pockets on the front that will hold stuff, and I’ve been wanting to get one of those for long runs, so that I can set out a little further than the hand held bottles will let me. I’m thinking the nathan hpl 020. There’s also Race Ready brand shorts which have a ton of pockets. I need somewhere to put 8 gels and whatever else I might carry with me on one of these long runs. Then again, you gotta not load ’em down too much or they’ll slide off.
I’ve been able to wing it on these 20 mile long runs, but I don’t want to count on that.
My coach that I never talk to is particularly unhappy with me right now. He doesn’t think I should be running beyond 20 miles ’cause of a variety of reasons he outlined yesterday. I think I’m going to need to let this guy go. He’s very good at what he does but he’s a road marathon guy, and what I’m running these days just doesn’t seem to correspond with his knowledge/training plans/etc. And while there’s not one on the horizon, it would be lunacy to attempt a 50 miler on 20 mile maximum training runs. I’m sure it’s frustrating to him that I appear not to listen to him or value what he offers me for training plans.
If the roads are covered in snow, you could just pull over and run to the trailhead. Snow exceeding 4in. will render any paved surface into a trail. It has its own idiosyncrasies but after a big dump, I take full advantage that my feet find traction on unplowed streets where cars don’t.
Belts are a headache. Even if you have hips, you have to cinch them to suppress the jostle, or else they will chafe. I had a Camelbak years ago that wouldn’t sit still, so I resorted to belts as a necessary evil. Now that there are vests, I’m thinking it’s time to try again. The Nathan pack designs are good, but supposedly their bladders are wanting. At $80 for the pack, I don’t know if I want to spend $20 – $40 more to fuss with fitting a different bladder system. Osprey makes a vest that seems to have caught the attention of some ultradudes. Then there’s Salomon’s S-pack, that ought to walk to the store and refill itself with fluid and Hammer gels for the price they’re asking.
I’m surprised and curious, what were your coach’s reasons for not exceeding 20 miles? Even for road marathons, that’s not a hard and fast rule.
His primary reason for not exceeding 20 miles is that beyond 20 miles I’m burning fat rather than glycogen. Why this is disadvantageous I’ve no idea, but I hear it mentioned a lot when talking about marathon training. The theory seems the be that 20 miles is the magic point, and so you don’t want to surpass it (and go into fat burning/post-hitting-the-wall territory) except when necessary, in races.
OK…so I will accept that (although I’m not sure what the underlying logic is)…but if I am running 50Ks or more on trails, which means time and distance, it seems to me I’m going to want my body to learn to make that adjustment, and function with some “comfort” past that magic point.
Salomon’s S-pack sounds rad, but $180?! Gee willikers, that’s a lotta cash! I have heard complaints about the Nathan bladder, but I’ve heard complaints about almost every bladder. Spending a few bucks more on a new bladder system would be a drag but still less than the Salomon. Osprey doesn’t look/seem like a running pack. I only see it mentioned as a mnt. bike pack. The Raptor, right?
I’m not convinced it’s gonna snow. It’s pretty wet down here in the below-500-feet part of town…
Well, there are complaints about design, and then there are complaints about basic function. I’m less forgiving of shortcomings in the latter. I’ve used Camelbak reservoirs, and they’re at least functional with decent longevity. Mostly what’s stopping me from that Nathan vest is finding a bladder that will fit. Offhand, I don’t know what to substitute, i.e. brand, size, shape, tubing above or below, etc. It also lacks a compression dial, so it may get the dreaded jostle as it empties.
Hmm, I thought Osprey had a vest design, but I must be mistaken. I can’t find anything like that on their website. I forgot about Camelbak’s clothing-integrated systems. They went one step farther, maybe too far.
Something got lost in the transmission, or your coach has it wrong. At around 20 miles, you [i}exhaust[/i] your glycogen and then begin burning whatever’s around, including fat and protein. Specifically you start raiding the protein lying around in the form of muscles, which is not so great and to be avoided for obvious reasons.
However, the magic point isn’t 20M. I can torch my glycogen in 15M by racing the first 13 at anaerobic threshold with no fuel. Alternatively, I can shuffle, and walk eating baked potatoes, and stretch my glycogen supplies for 28M.
Humour me for a little primer: metabolically, the best, fastest, and most efficient fuel for all cells is sugar. Glycogen and starch are chains of sugars. Glycogen is stored in muscles and the liver; starch comes from food. When necessary, protein and fat can also be metabolised, but you need more of either to get the same bang and the chemical pathways are not so efficient or quick. Even worse, you need some sugar around to metabolise fat, so if you’re truly tapped, the fat isn’t so available. If your body is deprived of sugar, that leaves protein as the next ready source of energy in a stress condition. (Running at some kinda decent pace is something your body biochemically experiences as a stress condition.)
That said, one objective of long runs (of any length in support of a race exceeding 2h) should be to exhaust glycogen. That’s how you adapt the body to cobble away more of it. I would agree with your coach though, that you should only need to go a couple miles past glycogen depletion. Nobody needs to teach their body how to burn fat. Our bodies already know how to endure a famine. And really, human minds and bodies are evolved to be intrinsically unhappy with famine.
All right, so back to ultras. Fueling for 50K isn’t so different from a marathon. The best racers get most of the way on glycogen with minor supplementation through gels. At 50M and beyond, everyone including the fastest is forced to supply a much higher proportion through ingestion, because there’s a limit to how much glycogen can be reasonably stored. Failing to solve this fuel consumption equation means the runner won’t finish, simply because mental will alone can’t be relied upon to drag a glycogen-depleted body across 20+ miles of trail.
However, hitting the wall during an ultra isn’t the tragedy that it is in a marathon. As long has you have some food in your pockets, you can slow down and permit your stomach to do its job of sugaring your cells. For a mountainous trail ultra, it might not even cost you much time. Still, once you’re depleted, pace will suffer so best to put off this eventuality until as close to the end as possible.
This in no way implies that the other benefits of a long run are insignificant. Especially for an ultra, you want to stimulate musculoskeletal transformations, which are arguably more important. I would just advocate that you supply your body with adequate food such that glycogen depletion isn’t a factor until the the last few miles of the run, be it 15, 20 or 40 miles.
Aha, Hydrapak makes the other hydration vest! Not Osprey.
The Hydrapack vest looks really good, actually. Only thing is it only hold 1.5 liters, which is what I carry in my handhelds. Even so, the pockets and the rest would still allow me/you/one to get rid of a belt altogether for gels, keys, and whatever else…Plus, great price!
I ended up getting the Nathan HPL 020, though, for two reasons. The first was the larger bladder size. The second is that I could try it on/buy it at REI, which means 100% no questions asked return policy if I decide it sucks…
I’m not too worried about returns. Most of my issues are around initial fit — some of us have chesticles to consider. I may be able to squeak by without a pack for a month or so anyway. In SB, a 12-mile run entails a minimum of 3000 ft. of ascent. I’m gonna have to take a few shoves at it before I can knock that off.
Nathan has a ladies specific version. Probably accommodates the thrusters. http://www.runningwarehouse.com/descpage-NATINT.html
I’m reading about people using Camelback replacement bladders with the Nathan. From what I can see, the Nathan is the only running specific hydration pack. All the rest, like the Osprey, seem to be much more geared towards mountain biking. Very different body position.
I think my coach is stuck in a road marathon racing place. All his advice seems very specific to that, and when I started working with him, that’s what I was still primarily working towards. (Maybe “stuck” is not a good word. Maybe I should say his advice seems appropriate to road marathons rather than say it’s stuck there). His strategies fit with your primer, basically. They do not take into account the fact that I typically do take some nutrition with me (although not enough). They also don’t really account for the other realities of a hill/mountain run. He talks a lot about pace, which I realized on my first trail race was something I was going to need to stop thinking about. Pace presumes conditions that just don’t exist except for maybe short little stretches here and there. He never talks about nutrition & hydration during the run, which is pretty much the first advice I get from any ultra runner.
I don’t know if it’s appropriate or not, but I now do everything based on effort rather than on pace. The effort is sort of pace based. It’s the effort I can put into a run on a relatively flat course, like, say, the bridle trails on the flats of Griffith Park, maintaining a steady pace. If pace stays the same, effort changes – it’s a little more effort at the end, and I need to dial it back a lot at the beginning. So I try to teach myself the feel of effort over distance, and then try to maintain that same effort over distance when the terrain is all over the place, which means pace fluctuates with terrain while effort remains consistent-ish.
I’m just making it up as I go along. I watched some Scott Jurek clip recently that was a great help in running hills. Nobody I know can explain how to run hills in a way that is useful to me. The trail runner folks I know are of two ilks: slow and steady walk-all-the-hills 50 – 100 miler types – all women who are much slower than I am at 50K (but capable of much greater distances), or else these A-type, 110%, faster-faster-faster, win! win! win! men who seem to take all the joy out of running for me. (Actually, they take all the joy out of everything. They often enjoy firearms, x-games, loud noises, MMA and have every-man-for-himself libertarian tendencies that I find troubling, to say the least. They are also often excessively concerned about what kind of engine is in their truck).
There are some gaps in what I can learn from the slow-and-steady types, (how to run uphill, for example) and nothing whatsoever I can learn from the A-types (’cause I cannot stand to be around them, and anyhow they are generally into shorter races ’cause those are more conducive to running high speed and charging up the steepest of hills).
Yesterday I tried to get out to where next weekend’s double half marathon will be run, but could not figure out where the start is. I think I stopped just short of it, actually; I think it’s after Corral Canyon road turns to dirt, which means mud in this weather. But perhaps I’ve figured it out from the other direction…It looks as though the turn-around is at or near Kanan Dume road. Maybe I’ll head out there and try it today. The race is a half marathon on single track with 2,500 feet of climbing…and I’ve signed up to do it twice. In between the two runs, I will attend my sister’s wedding rehearsal, and speak to my stepfather, who I haven’t spoken to in 11 or 12 years. The following day I am to photograph the wedding. That should be fun, ’cause I expect my legs to be shot and my mobility to be somewhat minimal.
Nothing wrong with making it up as you go. As far as I can tell, most of the best ultra racers coach themselves, suggesting that no one yet possesses a cache of training wisdom better than anyone else’s.
When I started running, I couldn’t afford HRMs or GPSs. Once in a while, I’d go to the track and measure what an easy effort was in minutes per mile. I used that one constant number to figure mileage for all of my runs, until the next time I went to the track. I did that for years. In my own logs, that’s still the way I measure trail runs. I give myself credit for the road pace that corresponds to the effort I spent on the trail, and calculate mileage accordingly. They’re private logs anyway, but it’s not for ego. It’s a much more accurate way of keeping track of training volume. A 6M trail run with 1400ft of climbing feels more like 10M on the road, and my legs agree. When I do two of those in a week, it’s a big discrepancy. If I was a full-time trail runner/racer, I’d switch to keeping track of time on all runs which achieves the same result.
You might be taking your coach more literally than he intends when he talks about pace. My first coach frequently told me something like run a tempo at 10K pace, even though neither of us knew what my 10K pace was. He meant the effort I could hold for a 10K, as opposed to the effort for a half-marathon or a 5K. I didn’t have a GPS, but an effort you can hold for a maximum of 20 minutes feels pretty distinct from one you can hold for 45min., or 90min. It’s just a kind of shorthand to refer to the 5 gears as 5K, 10K, half-, full-marathon, and easy paces. They could be measured on a GPS, as an equivalent HR, or quarter splits on a track. I learned effort because that’s the technology I had. I still opt to race and do speedwork by effort on roads, because it’s simply more accurate and flexible once you acquire it.
Effort-based running isn’t specifically a trail or ultra thing, although nowadays only new trail runners are forced to refine that skill. When necessary, I can judge my pace by effort to within 15s per mile on flats for a few hours, and that’s not at all unusual. Several of my running pals can dial it in to single digits. With practice sensitivity becomes sharper, and it gets easier to account for variable terrain and increasing fatigue.
I think I used the same Jurek clip last year, except to help with downhills. So far anyway, my uphill technique seems to be good enough; it mostly fixes itself depending on whether I can power up. If I can, then it’s more or less the form I’d use for hill repeats, with maybe a little shorter stride to extend endurance. For a sustainable steady pace, the grade and surface pretty much determine the stride length and footstrike I’ll use. Sometimes I shift the position of my hips a little forward or back while climbing to give some muscles a break. That tip to vary technique came from another SoCal-ian, I didn’t have to think about it in the east.
Wow, do you think you have enough going on that weekend? Sheesh, it would be easier if you were the one getting married. On the legs, I mean. Is this your sister who recently had surgery? Best wishes to her!