k r i s a n d r o

Without sounding like a drama queen who has been denied to eat her favourite McDonald’s Seaweed Shaker Fries…

I am so dead. I am so DEAD. I AM SO DEAD. I AM SOOOOOO DEADDDD!!!!!!!!!

Ok. Fine. That really sounded like a drama queen who has been denied to eat her favourite Shaker Fries.

My running routine was interrupted by a bout of flu some time back and I had to steer clear of my jogging shoes while I recovered from the nasty bugs for 3 whole weeks.

Not only did I miss at least 90km of training but after trying to run again after the 3 week long break, I realized my mind, body and heart were so much weaker and I could not go back to the same intensity I was training prior to the flu. I should be hitting 22km for my long run this weak but instead, I have only managed to run a furthest distance of 12km so far.

With the Army Half Marathon only 11 days away, I am in serious deep shit.

I have thoughts about forgoing the 21km race next Sunday and concentrate on the year end’s Standard Chartered Marathon instead but I find it such a pity to not run when I have paid up and actually asked friends to join me for the run.

So I am probably going to generously adjust my pace so that I run as fast as a Shaker Fries deprived drama queen to make sure I am slow enough to finish the run.

I am so dead.

I had a great week of marathon training last week, hitting 30.13km of total mileage and meeting all my training goals except for a very disappointing Tempo run yesterday. I could blame it on the weather, the lack of breakfast, or the absence of babes on the jogging track that day but it’s probably all due to my bad planning and unrealistic pace for the run.

Setbacks like that are very good for my analysis and besides, the rest for the 26km ran that week was better than what I have expected.

It’s now week 7 of my marathon training with 25 weeks remaining to the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009 and although my margins for improvement are starting to get smaller, it is still quite apparent that I am getting faster and longer. Faster in terms of pace and longer in terms of distance of course. You peeps don’t get dirty now.

Besides the improvement of my resting heart rate from 66bpm (beats per minute) to the current 60bpm, I can see from the logs of my Long runs that even though my pace and distance has increased, the effort perceived by my heart rate has actually lessened!

It’s quite exciting and interesting to see my body improving and adapting to my exercise regime and that makes me look forward to the next run as I can predict and plan my pace much more easily than just running by pure feel and intuition. So I highly suggest that everyone who is training to collect as much statistics as you can about your runs. At the very least, invest in a watch that has a lap function. And I believe the same applies to training for any sport as well with reference to collection of statistics.

Grab your shoes and a watch and head out to run peeps! Feel alive!

Yeah I know I haven’t been up to my usual self with regards to blogging and boring most of my usual readers with enthusiasm for my marathon training. Weird that I am seeing lesser funny, blog-worthy stuffs around. Either the weird situations have left me or I have been too busy sweating it out and being too high on adrenaline to notice the rest of the world slipping on banana peels and falling on their faces.

On the positive end of things, my knees are starting to get used to the idea of running 30km a week and I can feel my fitness levels rising steadily. It’s still a long way to beating the fitness level I had when I was 20-22 years of age but I believe that I can overcome that very soon if I keep at what I am doing. It’s still pretty amazing to think that I am now scoffing at how short a 10km run is when just a few months ago, I was having cold sweat just thinking about a 2.4km run for IPPT.

On the negative end of things, I am on the way to a career change and as bad it is to do so during such a economically bad period, it’s quite exciting to think of what the future might hold with this move.

Life changing moves with my health and career. 2009 might prove to be the biggest and potentially best year yet!

[Image by Michael Mistretta]

I usually start off my runs with lots of enthusiasm and energy and by the midway mark, I would usually lose steam and from then on, it is usually a struggle to the finish and my timings for the run would be called a positive split. That is if you section the run into halves or many parts, the earlier parts of the run are much faster and they get progressively slower as distance and time passes. Find this familiar? I am guessing that most people actually run this way as it is probably the most natural thing to do.

Of course the best way to run is to run even splits whereby one races at a constant pace throughout the length of the race but that is quite hard to do unless one was on a treadmill or has extreme running discipline.

It was with extreme interest when I discovered that many top athletes & coaches around the world train and enforce negative splits in their runs which is to run the 2nd half of the course faster than the 1st. The theory behind this is that by holding back during the first half of the run, the glycogen in your body that acts as fuel is reserved better for the latter part of the run. It is also said that it takes a couple of kilometres for the runner to get over the inertia and running too hard from the get-go wastes too much energy. Another very important aspect about running negative splits is that the picking up of the pace during the 2nd half of the race will have you overtaking other runners and this brings a lot of mental strength which is so very important in a long distance run.

So much for the above in theory but I actually put it to the test at 12.30am on Sunday morning for an 11km long run. The last long run I had was a week ago on a Thursday and it as at a 10km distance with a pace of 6mins 29secs per km and that run was a struggle from the halfway mark and it was like any of my runs before, a big positive split.

Now, to help you guys visualize better on how a negative split run looks like, here is the breakdown of my run on Sunday.

Despite running for a longer distance on Sunday, I actually improved my pace by 6secs per km! You can see how the negative splits work by looking at the columns highlighted in yellow. I aimed to run my first half of the training at a 6mins 38secs pace and the 2nd half at a 6mins 14secs pace and as you can see, I mostly ran faster than what I set out to do. I was actually struggling to hold back my speed at the start of the run. But by the time I hit the halfway mark, I realized that I was so much comfortable at this point then previous runs. Pushing up my speed for the 2nd half was hard but comfortable enough which was almost impossible to do if I stuck to my old way of running. And at the end of the 11km run, I felt that I still had some gas left in the tank compared to feeling spent for previous runs.

There is still a long way of experimenting on this tactic for running and I will update you guys as I go along my training for the marathon at the end of the year. For those runners who are interested in trying negative splits without having equipment like Nike+ or GPS watches like Garmin/Polar to track your pace and distance, you can either try running around the track where you can plan & track your lap timings or do like what I advised KuKuNehNeh to do for her 10km run for Adidas Sundown that happened on Saturday; run the first half of the race slower than your comfortable pace and try to push your pace up at the halfway mark. The race results are not out yet but I think she improved her timing by at least 10-15mins and experienced a more comfortable run to the finish. Read about her experience here!

These are some links to read up on negative splits.

The Positives of Negative Splits

Examples of Negative Splits That Worked

Calculate splits for runs here