It Sucks to get Sick

I had a great workout yesterday.  Managed a Strava PR on a 1.07 mile uphill stretch near my house, which was fun being that I set out to do that once we moved in April.  In fact, looking back, when we first moved in, my very first attempt was done in 12:38.  Of course, I wasn't trying to go hard or fast that day, and, in fact, waited until June to make my first attempt to setting a PR.  Two months later, there it was, my baseline, 9:25, with a all-out attack on the hill.  A month later I took the hill on and managed 9:08, tantalizingly close to the sub 9 minute goal that I'd tentatively set for myself.  After that, it was time to train for Kona, and there was no room for an all out assault on the climb.  Obviously, after Kona, I was in no shape to do that either, but for the last few weeks, I've been working on my speed.  Yesterday was the day.  I'd do my regular warm up and then attack the climb.  I had a strategy in mind, which was to start fast and hard, but not completely all out.  It was, of course going to be close to 9 minutes of effort, and going out too hard would trash me at the very end, which, by the way, is the steepest part of the climb.

That was the other strategy.  The climb starts out relatively flat, then with an incline, and then it flattens out again before hitting the steeper sections at the end.  By setting my Garmin watch to Lap Pace, I'd be able to glance down and see how I was doing.  I figured that I would start closer to 6 minute pace, on the flatter section, and that would go up to about 7 minute pace once I hit the first climbs.  I knew from past experience that I'd furiously want to stay below 8 minute pace for as long as possible, and that the final part of the climb would be the hardest.

I wore my heart rate monitor, in order to extract data that I could look back at.  I paid no attention to my heart rate during the run.  Within two minutes, my HR was at 151.  At three minutes, I'd popped up to 170.  For the next three minutes, I held my HR right there, my pace, on sections as steep as 5% initially remained under 9 minute pace, but started to drop on these sections.  The next two minutes embodied the steepest sections of the climb, going up to 9% grade.  My HR peaked at 175, and my pace on the steepest sections remained under 11 minute pace, and actually stayed relatively close to 10 minute pace.

I'm not exactly sure where this Strava segment ends, so I was planning on pushing until I couldn't.  It turns out that with about 35 seconds left, I switched over to walking, and my HR had actually dropped to 167 when I hit the end of the segment.  There was one major reason that I needed to stop.  It wasn't that my breathing couldn't handle it anymore.  It wasn't that my legs couldn't handle it anymore  It was that for the preceding 30 seconds I'd been extending a lot of effort to avoid crapping my running shorts (sorry to be so explicit).  Something had been triggered that was causing this feeling.  I held out for about 30 seconds before making the decision to start walking.  The feeling subsided.

What was my final time?  It was 8:56.  I broke that 9 minute threshold, averaging about 8:20 pace per mile.  The 1.07 mile segment has 200 feet of climbing, making the average grade about 4%. The steepest sections, which come at the end, of course, hit 9.4%.  Here was the coolest thing.  It's why I love Strava from a goal perspective.  From a forever perspective, the CR, or course record is 7:08.  My 8:56 time is 67th all time (of 417 people who've tackled the climb).  However, Strava also allows me to look at how my time fared this past year, of which we have one week to go.  On that, my time was the 10th fastest of the year (of 104 people).  The fastest time this year was 7:19.

I'm not sure what next year will bring, but I have something to shoot for.  Without my bodily function breakdown at the end, I might have gone as low as 8:45.  Somehow, in the back of my head, I want to work on my speed, especially my climbing speed, and my 10 minute speed endurance, and see if I can bring this time down to 8 minutes.  It's ambitious, but it would put me in the top 25 all time.

Oh yes, why does it suck to be sick?  I was going to do another speed session this morning.  Got my warm up in.  Within 3 steps of trying to run, my body told me no.  It turns out that I've finally got the GI bug that went through my family last week.  Fortunately, I've got very little in my stomach, because I don't eat much in the morning, and there's not too much in my colon, thanks to last week's colonoscopy.  So, I just feel crappy.  I'm laying in bed while I write this, hoping that this will be a typical 12 hour hit to my body and I'll feel better by late tonight, and certainly by tomorrow morning. Maybe it doesn't suck too much to be sick, if this is how it happens.  I also realize that the body aches that hit me last night and this morning weren't from yesterdays workout.  I'll always blame my workouts before I admit to being sick!