12 weeks and going strong

Amazingly, things are still stepping up well. My body is feeling the push a lot more and is asking for more rest, but the weak hints of potential injuries gave way to healthiness. There is no stopping the everlasting determination. I have figured something out: I need a nickname. There are too many possibilities.

This is what happened throughout the week

13 weeks to go
Monday: Taekwondo practice (1:20)
Tuesday: 9 miles at 7:35 min/mile pace then 2 hours of olympic lifting/core work
Wednesday: TKD practice (1:20)
Thursday: Core Craziness Type 2, 4 sets (last without pushups)
Friday: Lazy day (rest)
Saturday: 68 minute run (roughly 7:30 min/mile pace)
Sunday: Biking (3:01)

Weight: Low 173.2 and median 174.6

Core Craziness Type 2
7 pushups
30 crunches with a 1 second hold on top (lift full spine off the ground)
7 pushups
30 side crunches with the 1s hold
7 pushups
30 other side
7 pushups
30 leg lifts
7 pushups
30 supermans

Why oh why do this to myself?

The major thing that you may notice about this week is that I took two days off my legs in a row. That was in response to my body calling out, "Please stop. Please stop!" Each long run was getting harder and even though I was stepping up distance, I was forced to take small steps back in speed and intensity. My body just needed a couple days off my feet. Two days entirely off would be just a mistake and I've been neglecting the core work that is so necessary for the obstacles, so I worked my cardio and built up those critical muscles with the Core Craziness. I didn't do pushups on the last set because my pushup muscles were already exhausted. If you've worked a muscle to failure, it's a good time to stop. You're not getting much out of it if you try to push it harder. Remember, that muscle needs to recover before it'll be able to work for you.

The other major change was motivated by the previous one: I did two long workouts in a row. If you've noticed, I've been almost religiously keeping to hard-"easy" day routine. That's because of the well established literature that your body takes 24 hours to be at the trough of performance after a hard workout then the second 24 hours is building back up. Once you get to 48 hours out, your body is ready to go again, and stronger. So why the two workouts in a row? Did I forget good science and unabashedly ignore that strong reasoning? Of course not! As a scientist, that would be unheard of. Instead, I'm looking ahead to my toughest workout in my future: 15+ miles of running on Friday evening, 4 hours of biking on Saturday morning and 15+ miles of running on Saturday evening. That'll make me prepped to run roughly 45 mile-equivalents on race day. But, in order to complete that crazy training, I need to get my mind used to going back two days in a row and working hard.

Progression towards the sky. As advertized last week, I am increasing the distance on my runs more slowly now. I was at 8 miles last week and now I've graduated (yay) to 9 miles. The first run at 9 miles felt quite bad to start with. I was running 7:45's and my legs hurt bad. They just were complaining until around mile 4 to 5 when they started relaxing. The pace quickened and I got into a groove. The last mile was around 7:10 pace (with a 200m kick, as always). That was part of why I knew that my body needed rest. Coming back after that rest, the 9 miles (68 min) on soft ground was a breeze. I came back afterwards feeling like I could do more and faster. It was just so relaxing and smooth. Rest is good. The plan for this week: 10 miles. You may say "Ooh, double digits" but in the grand scheme of things, I'm ready. Bring it on.

Goals for the future

I've already talked about the goal for the lazy insane set of training workouts (30+ miles running, 4 hours biking in 24 hours). That's motivated by my distance goal. The winner (Pak-man) last year completed 7 laps. He also slept for around 6 hours, did his first 8 mile lap in 1:37, and had some people claiming that he skipped obstacles. No such weakness is in my plan.

One of my key plans is to just keep on Rollin'. There will be no sleeping. Resting is characterized by walking continually and just making the effort when I reach an obstacle. Sleeping is for Sunday, after I cross that finish line the last time. That said, I understand why Pak-man stopped. His race plan was to stay in front the whole time and keep it that way. Admirable, but when you're going for distance, you've got to let those young whippersnappers beat you on the first couple laps. That means if your goal is 12 laps, you better get that first lap done somewhere around 1:30 to 2 hours. Pak-man did 7, so he was going too fast on the first lap.

About the claim of skipping obstacles, I really hope that they are false reports. It's not in the mudder spirit to cheap out. The obstacles are what we're there for. Everyone who trains can run 56 miles in 24 hours. The 24-hour races generally cover around 100 miles. My goal is to exemplify a true mudder. I was presented a short stick (obstacle in the way). No one else would take that stick. I did. I took that stick and... that's worth somethin'.

That bring us to the last topic of this week: training for obstacles. You may notice that I'm not doing focused training for obstacles yet. For one, we can only guess what the obstacles are going to be until we show up on race day and go over them. You can say that I can prepare for the known obstacles (mud mile, Berlin wall, rings, monkey bars, etc..). I would say that "Congratulations! You're right." The lifting, Taekwondo and core work are great preparation for obstacles. For one, Berlin Wall is just an uber-pull-up. We're doing lots of pull-ups. That said, I fully plan on going to Venice beach and spending some good time on the rings and also on UCLA's Drake Track for the monkey bars. The thing is that I don't really need to do that yet. I've got the technique for each of those key obstacles down, so once we get like 4-8 weeks out, I'll start working on my grip and technique for those specific obstacles. I'll have the huge base of fitness to work from and the obstacles themselves are not they key difficulty in the run. Well... that's my opinion. We'll see if it'll hold up on race day.

So... that bring me to the goal for race day: 8+ laps. That's 64+ miles. That's 1 lap more than Pak-man (winner last year). If I am prepped to run 45 miles in roughly 8 hours then I should be able to walk 19 more miles and do obstacles in the remaining 16. If that wins me the race, so be it. If I end out doing more on race day, power to me. That's the high bar I set for myself and we'll see if I soar over it with many many steps of pain or if I come short.

13 weeks to go

The craziness continues. It's actually really not bad. I'm still feeling quite good so far. The distance is ramping up and little aches and twinges are happening but they're not sticking around much. If things keep up like this, then all of this will be easy. Of course, that's not going to happen but everyone can dream.

Okay, so this is what I did this week, with some recap from last week.

14 weeks to go
Monday: lazy day (rest)
Tuesday: 8 mile run (7:20 min/mile) then olympic lifting for 2 hours
Wednesday: TKD practice (1:20)
Thursday: lazy day (rest)
Friday: 60 minute run on soft ground (7:30ish min/mile pace)

13 weeks to go
Saturday: 30 minute trail run
Sunday: Biking 2:37

Weight: Still at 176... but I did have two all you can eat dinners this week (Go Meat). My low was 173 this week and I'm noticing that I'm losing fat and increasing muscle mass. That's confusing, but weight loss is a long term game. We'll see what's up with time.

Clarifications

I'd like to let you into one of my little circle of secrets. When I write specific milage, it's because I know the actual mileage from running on a track and/or looking it up using Google Maps, with the walking plugin. When I write times, however, it's because I don't know the specific distance. A general rule of thumb is that I run at 7:30 min/mile pace. My bike isn't actually made for exercise riding (hybrid), so the scaling of time to distance doesn't make a lot of sense.

The mudder spirit is strong with me. When I'm counting distance and time, resting and walking does not count. That means when I stop at stoplights, the timer also stops. When I stop and walk a little (walking is for the weak, except for later...), the distance counter stops. Otherwise, I'll be cheating. Cheating is for little panzies like Fess from Canton (if you're lost, go watch more Firefly). In order to compete successfully in World's Toughest Mudder, I must stand up against the likes of Magistrate Higgins and be strong. This hill'verse didn't hand me the longest end of the stick but I took it, and.... I guess that's something.

Again, if you're lost, you need to watch more Firefly. Given that I really hope Tough Mudder was inspired by the Jaynestown episode of Firefly, to really understand the event, you need to be very comfortable with the series. (If you'd like to watch more, I do have the full season.)

So why?

As you can tell, I'm quickly ramping up the distance and the time. Last week I ran 6 miles before lifting on Tuesday and biked for 2:07. This week I ran 8 miles before lifting, ran 8-ish miles on Friday, then also increased my biking time to 2:37. That's a pretty quick pace of increasing the mileage, isn't it? Well, as crazy as I am, I'm not going to be keeping that pace up. That would just spell injuries and over training. My body would constantly be catching up with itself and never actually getting better.

So why increasing so fast right now? I'm comfortable with running for an hour (8 miles) straight. I have been for a while. I just hadn't done it in a while, so I just needed to ramp up to what I know I can repeat over an over again. A single hour of hardcore running at that quick pace will give me the cardio and muscle for at least 3 to 4 hours of World's Toughest Mudder (WTM). While that's far short of 24 plus, it's a very good place to start (cue Sound of Music).

What's the plan, Stan? I'm going to keep one of the 8 mile runs per week and begin increasing the distance on the other one. My goal for 3 weeks before to event is to be able to run 15 miles twice in two days plus also bike for 4 hours on the second day. That means that I've got 7 more miles to add in 10 weeks. Now that's quite a lot more reasonable. In addition to increasing the distance and time on the other days, the long run will increase by at least one mile per week. Some weeks may increase faster and others slower, based on how my legs and, primarily, my gimpy ankle, feels.

Wait, so why increase the biking by 30 minutes too? That gets back to the biking for 4 hours on the second day. So far I've got 2:37, which is quite close to 4 hours. I'm going to keep increasing by around 21 minutes each week. That's primarily motivated by two things (1) I feel like I can do that quite easily and (2) I'm doing a 20-21 minute loop, so life just all makes sense if I do it that way. If I do that, I'll be up to 4 hours in about 4 weeks.

That's way too early, right? Absolutely. That'll make the biking part of my last crazy training workout the easy part. It'll also mean that in about 10 weeks, I'll be prepped to be biking constantly for 6 hours straight. That'll hopefully give me the base to keep going at it for at least 12-18 hours. As for the last 6 hours... did I mention that I'm crazy?

And... how is my body holding up?

Quite well, actually. I got reminded about my injuries this week. Luckily, it's not my ankle that bothered me first. My left platellar ligament has been hurting a little during the day and also when biking. For those of you not medically inclined, that's basically my left knee. I think it's an over use injury from biking. That means that I'm taking it easy when biking to and from work and things got better by the end of the week.

My gimpy ankle hurt for the first mile of Friday's run and then again during the uphill parts of the trail run. Luckily, once I got to flatter ground and just ran through the pain, it all went away. That tells me that I'm ramping things up at a good pace. A little pain is okay, as long as it goes away relatively quickly and doesn't stick around after the run.

That brings me to the last point to cover this week: Trail Runs.

(1) Trail runs are hard. So you think you're all tough if you can run on flat ground for 4 to 10 times longer. Well, sorry son, you're wrong. Going uphill at any appreciable grade will sap your energy and your muscles... FAST. Happily, at least the first mile of my trail run was all uphill... ALL uphill. It was only 8 minutes, but it was painful. I'll need to do a lot more trail runs to get ready for WTM. Otherwise, I'm going to get zapped instantaneously.
(2) When running downhill, run on your toes and don't get too excited. If you run on your heels, you're putting all the impact of your weight, plus your momentum, into your knees. That'll get really problematic really fast. You can soften the blow by pointing your toes and allowing the ball of your foot to hit first. That way, the lever of your ankle will take some of the impact away from your knees. Now, even though it's fun to blaze down the hill, you also need to be careful. Trails turn fast and hard. You don't want to build up too much momentum or... whooops, there you go off a cliff. You can't train or race hard if you're recovering from that. So, how do you stop the momentum? Run in a sine wave (non-mathematicians call it a zig-zag). Generally this means that you're running more distance, but it also means that you're artificially decreasing the gradient of the hill. That means you build up less momentum and also get less impact on your knees (yay).
(3) Running fast uphill looks like you're a beast, but in the long run, it's not worth it. WTM is running a loop. That means that when there's an uphill, there's also a downhill. If you take your time on the uphill, you're saving energy to go faster easier on the downhill or the flat. Also, when you're looking to run for 24 hours, running up hill like a fiend is a great way to waste 30 minutes of energy in like 30 seconds. So, as much as I'm going to push it going up hills, I'm going to practice taking it a tad easier than I'd like on that part, so I don't get ahead of myself on WTM-day.

14 weeks to go

I'm feeling pretty good so far. My body is all in good shape. As I post about what I'm doing, I'm going to try my best to also let you know why. Just FYI, this is not my first week training for Tough Mudder. (Times are H:MM unless they're mile times, then they're MM:SS)

15 weeks to go
Saturday: Camarillo Mayor's Cup Taekwondo Championship (Gold Medal + Reffing all day long)
Sunday: Biking 1:30, 4 loops of San Vicente plus getting there
Monday: Taekwondo Practice (1:20)
Tuesday: 6 miles at 7:30 min/mile pace + olympic lifting for 2 hours
Wednesday: Taekwondo Practice (1:20)
Thursday: Lazy day (rest)
Friday: 2 mile run (6:30 min/mile, stretch then 6:00 min/mile) then core craziness type 1 (5 sets)

14 weeks to go
Saturday: Lazy day (rest)
Sunday: Biking 2:09, 6 loops of San Vicente plus getting there

Chubby monkey scale: 173 lbs at 15 weeks to go, 176 now (I got hungry and had poker night).

Core Craziness Type 1
7 pushups
20 slow, hold at the top, crunches
7 pushups
20 oblique crunches
7 pushups
20 oblique crunches (other side)
Congratulations, you've finished one set. Your reward: do it again (in this case, 5 times)

Okay, so why?

Here's my basic theory behind training for a 24+ hour race: there's no way that I'm going to be doing 12 hours of working out per day regularly. That also just isn't good for your body. I've heard the caution that you only have so many good marathons in you. If I'm running more than a marathon in training, then I have to be doing something wrong. That means that I'm going to do less hours of training but have them be more intense. I'm going to get the distance up, but also recognize that I'm not going to get to 50 miles/day or 12hours/day. When I get to the actual event, I just need to keep my heart rate down, keep on trucking (cue Rollin' Rollin' Rollin') song and channel the Mudder Spirit (cue Firefly episode: Jaynestown).

The other part is that there's no way that my feet, ankles, knees and back could take that much distance on foot. That means that I have to cross train to get my heart up to speed while my body is catching up. For now, that means using biking as my long "runs" because it works similar muscles and has less impact so I don't build up damage to my body. Meanwhile, I use other days to work up my actual running distance until my body can keep up with my heart.

Also, Tough Mudder isn't like the 100 milers and the other 24 hour events. It's got obstacles. Last year it had 39 obstacles per 8-9 miles. That means that (1) I am NOT going to run 100 miles in 24 hours and (2) I need to train up other muscle groups for the obstacles. Conveniently, I'm the President of the UCLA Taekwondo (TKD) competition team. That's a lot of explosive motions over longer periods of time. Even though it's all done on your feet, you don't have the repetitive motions of putting you feet down. There are a lot of other activities that tie you out during practice. As part of team training, we also do olympic lifts and hardcore core workouts. In aggregate, TKD builds the explosive power needed for the obstacles while also keeping up the endurance that you need for the craziness of 24 hours.

The other part that I'm working on is my weight. I'm a little chunky now because I fight welter weight for TKD. I'm 5 foot 9 inches (1.75m), so technically I'm overweight. Unless you're a naive doctor looking at his charts (happened), when you look at me, you'd never guess. I've got a healthy amount of fat on me, but I've also got a hefty amount of muscle from lifting and TKD. My goal is to get my weight down to 150/155-ish by just increasing distance but not changing my eating habits. That way I go back down to something that's more reasonable for running shape but it's also reasonable given my current weight. Dropping 20 pounds in 14 weeks won't be easy, but when you're working up to "running" 90 miles a week, methinks it's more possible. Just for comparison's sake, I haven't been 150 lbs since 2005 (graduating high school). When I was in running shape, I was 140 lbs and I was a little bigger than I should have been for running.

The Start of the Craziness

Yes, I'm crazy.

That's why I'm doing World's Toughest Mudder on November 17th and 18th, 2012. It's quite a simple logical corollary.

World's Toughest Mudder Page

Here's the recipe: take a male that used to run competitively. Age him and put him through college so that he's not elite anymore, and also 35 pounds fatter than he was before, then throw in some medical school and graduate school but keep the indominable spirit and the will to push his body to the wall, even when he doesn't have to. Introduce him to Tough Mudder and he'll qualify for World's Toughest Mudder. Then tell him that the race is 24 hours, includes harder obstacles and, in general, is just made to be as hard as possible. Said male will get excited and proceed to go crazy: otherwise known as register and train for the event.

The basic idea behind this blog (I'm new to blogging) is to write down what I'm doing to train and how I'm feeling about it. I've got some people supporting me throughout (Thanks Mum and Dad) and this is an easy way to share and also pump myself up. Who knows if I'll go so far to post training videos and try to inspire future generations and fellow mudders. We'll just see how it goes.

If you're reading this as a training guide to absolute craziness, it's important for you to know my background and where I started in my road to absolute insanity. Here's my sport credentials:

Middle/High School: Cross Country, Track & Field
C'05 American School of the Hague
Trained for Dutch National Races (5k/8k/10k) with Leiden Atletiek

Undergrad
C'09 University of Pennsylvania
Void Ultimate Frisbee Team
Penn ITF Taekwondo Club
Penn WTF Taekwondo Club

Med/Grad School
University of California, Los Angeles
UCLA Taekwondo Club

PRs:
5k: 16:01 (2004)
10k: 34:14 (2004)
13.1 mile: 1:36 (2010)
Tough Mudder So Cal #2: 2:23 (2012)

Those of you that know what that all means know that I was good (not amazing) and now I'm still quite reasonable, but am no where near the shape I was in before.

The other caveat to my performance is that, when I was aged, I also come with chronic injuries, as we all do. I destroyed (yes, appropriate word) my right ankle in 2008. In addition to breaking the bone, I also messed up the cartilidge. That means that I can't build up distance as fast as the average Joe and I'm always going to have pain if I go too long. The doctors say that I basically shouldn't run distance anymore but, well, I covered this already: I'm crazy.