Showing posts with label maturity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maturity. Show all posts

Friday, July 20, 2007

Words I Refuse To Use

There are certain words that you will not see on this blog. Ever. With the exception of this post, because how else would I tell you about them. Oh, and another exception would be the comments section because I know that some of my fine commenters use these words on occasion. No other exceptions… until further notice.

I hereby pronounce the following words banned at Half-Fast:

Half Mary: This is often used in running communities as an abbreviation of half marathon. A half marathon is 13.1 long miles. On October 14th this year the Denver Half Marathon will soundly kick my rump and I'd prefer not to have my rump kicker named after a girl thank you very much. I know that there are many runners who've run longer distances in shorter times, but this will be challenging for me and there will be no sissying it up by referring to it as a half mary. Not on this blog. It was bad enough that during my first attempt at skiing, I was humbled by a bunny slope named the Schoolmarm (more like the Widowmaker), I refuse to now also be humbled by something called the half mary. Perhaps I'll coin a new term; the Half Martin. I think that could catch on quite nicely, although I'm not entirely sure how much tougher Martin is than Mary, with apologies to any Martin's out there reading this... what are you going to do? Beat me up? I doubt it!

Fartlek: If there's anyone reading this who's not familiar with this term you can find an excellent definition of it here. I don't mind when other people use this word but to be blatantly honest with you I think I'm a little too immature to use it. I just don't trust myself to write it without resorting to childish, grade school jokes and none of us wants to see that here on Half-Fast. I'll stick to calling it speedwork or interval training and leave the fartleks to the more serious bloggers who can handle the responsibility of using the word appropriately.

Jog: This also includes any variation of the word, jogging, jogger etc. I'm a runner. I run. Even when I'm doing a recovery run I still consider it running. Everyone has their own opinion on this but that's mine. I know that I used the word in my running vs jogging debate, but there was really no way around it.

Onomatopoeia: Because why would I ever need to use this word on my blog?

That's it for now. Just those four words. I'm sure that I'll have more to add in the future.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Stride Rate

I ran 5 miles last night and the ankle felt a little sore but generally pretty good, I even did 3 tempo miles at an 8:54 minute mile pace. I played around with my stride rate a little which is something that I’ve been considering doing anyway after reading this article.

The article claims that almost all elite distance runners have a stride rate of roughly 180, which means that every minute they take 180 strides or steps. For the mathematically challenged among you that equates to 3 steps per second, or so my calculator tells me. I personally don’t put a lot of faith in that calculator because just the other day I asked it what 1,329,502 * 4 was and it told me “BOOBIES,” which is the answer to many of life’s questions and while it caused me to giggle like a schoolboy reading Moby Dick for the first time, I’m quite sure it’s not the right answer.

Getting back on track, my natural stride rate is around 160, which is a good indication that I’m not an elite athlete. Also a good indication: body fat percentage of 22%, a diet that includes hot waffle sandwiches and feet named 'slow poke' and 'molasses'. Despite all these inadequacies, I have on a couple of occasions shortened my stride and managed to get to 180 strides per minute. I was able to do this for a couple of miles at a time and it resulted in significantly faster times, the downside was that my legs got tired a lot quicker and felt sore in places they don’t usually. I doubt that 5 days before a race is a good time to start messing with your stride, but it’s definitely something that I’m going to look into after the Bolder Boulder.

*tee hee* BOOBIES and Moby Dick all in the same post. *snicker*

Alright, how many of you grabbed your calculator and multiplied 1,329,502 by 4?