This weekend I head to New York to run the New York City Marathon. This will be my third marathon of the year and fourth time running 26.2. I realize though that the feat I accomplished is much different than the one most people think of when they hear the word ‘marathon’. The New York Marathon will have nearly fifty thousand finishers. For most of them, the race is a grueling test of their will lasting 4-6 or sometimes up to 8 hours . For many, the goal is just to finish – and doing so is a great accomplishment. That is a very different event than the races I have participated in. Though it was the same distance, it wasn’t the same type of test. It didn’t require the same type of grit. The race I ran lasted 2:42 minutes. I say this not to brag, but to set context
This year I challenged myself to break 2:37 in the marathon. In order to hit that time I would need to get into the best shape of my life. But things have changed in my life from when I raced in college and my training plan would have to take that into account. Here are details about the training philosophy I used to race my first marathon. Update: Ultimately it resulted in a time of 2:42:23 – you can read my race report from the Jack & Jill Marathon as well as my race report from the New York City Marathon later that year. Background – My Historic Training Plan Before I get into the plan, here is some background on me as a runner. I ran for my school team’s in high school & college – eventually making varsity at each. I was a good local-level competitive runner, but never state
With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. Now that the year is half way through (maybe a bit more) I want to check in on how things are going. 2016 Focus At a macro level I am doing ok so far, probably as well as I will do. I have realized that I spread myself a bit too thin with these items this year though. Introducing a new one certainly exacerbated that. Having four items of focus is simply too many. Some of them have overlap, such as running & health – but others take me in a completely different direction. One of the things I’ve learned and will change for my focus next year is to have the theme be a central item that the goal, challenge & exemplar all tie back to. For example if health
On July 31, 2016 I raced my first marathon. I finished in a time of 2:42:23, taking first place in the race. Here is the race report. Compared to the Ironman I did in 2014, this race was relatively quick and not quite as grueling – but it was much more intense and there was far less margin for error. To put numbers to that – during my Ironman my average heart rate was 137 BMP or about 74% of my maximum. For this marathon it was 166 BPM or 90% of my maximum. My goal, which I had set at the beginning of the year before I started my training regimen, was to break 2:37. I missed by about six minutes. If you don’t fail once in a while, you aren’t trying hard enough. This was an intentionally aggressive goal that was set without context months earlier. That said, I think
1,397.4 miles to get to this point. Tomorrow I am racing a marathon for the first time. Everything so far has been designed to lead up to this race. The training gradually built up to reach full strength this month. The workouts were specific to this course’s terrain. The research into logistics, the headlamp for the tunnel, the TP for the ten mile stretch with no other option. Finally the intensity slowly backed off to enter this race fully rested. Everything has been for tomorrow. This is the culmination of nine months work. Yet tomorrow doesn’t really matter. If I hit my time, nothing about my life will change. I will still have diapers to change that evening and an office to get to Monday morning. If I don’t hit it – even if I were to trip and sprain my ankle at the start, it wouldn’t change any of those
Earlier this year I made Benjamin Franklin my exemplar for 2016. That meant that I’d spend part of this year learning about his habits & practices and then implementing some. The idea is to learn from the wisdom of a great person and try to benefit from some of that myself. Two months into the year I’ve narrowed into a few things that stand out to me about Ben. 1. Pursuit of Excellence in His Craft Benjamin Franklins business & political success often draws back to a single asset he had available to him – his writing. He is cited by some scholars as being the best writer in colonial America. He used that talent to create a newspaper & almanac that drove both profited him and helped keep his print shop busy. He also used it to convince others of topics that were important to him such as the
Earlier this year I picked running a marathon in under 2:37 as my challenge for 2016. Because this challenge is very specific, I wanted to spend some time discussing my thought process behind it. I think it will help add context to this particularly goal and how I approach goal setting in general. Deciding On A Level of Difficulty The first thing I do when setting a goal is decide on how difficult I want it to be to achieve. I am an extremely competitive and motivated person so I like to pick challenges that will stretch me. I like to be scared that I won’t be able to achieve it so that I have to be resourceful in order to succeed. I like the process. Standing at the peak isn’t the end that justifies the means for me, it is the means for me justifying the end that is the
When optimizing, the goal is always to maximize the output for a specific investment of inputs. Those inputs are typically things like money, time, effort, materials, space, etc. We want to get more bang for our buck, results for time put in, etc. No optimization problem operates in a vacuum though. There are always constraints – limits that keep the equation from scaling linearly forever. These might be hard constraints that stop you in your tracks. Perhaps the constraint is the number of available outputs. If you’ve already trained enough to win a race, you can’t double-win it. Or perhaps they are soft constraints. that create strange non-linear scale, either in a positive or negative manner. Perhaps the first 100 units of output can be achieved at a ratio of 1:1 input to output, but the next 100 require 3:2 input to output. This means that over time you have diminishing
With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I’ve enjoyed this activity as it has slowly evolved over the past four years. It helps me strive to complete things that I think are important or interesting but more importantly it give me focus by allowing me to say ‘no’ to other things. Categories Here are definitions for the four categories of efforts I undertake. Goal – Something I want to accomplish that is measurable and relatively continual. e.g. exercise X times per week or decrease sugar consumption by X percent. These are often habits I want to build into my life an my hope is that by doing it for a year, it will stick. Theme – A central topic for the year – something I can spend time thinking about and take a few concrete efforts towards. e.g. living in community or freedom. These
At the beginning of 2015 I wrote about my goal, theme and challenge for the year. I’ve posted a few updates throughout the year but want to take some time now to do a final review. 2015 Goal: Read 26 Books Self Grade: 5/10 My goal was to read 26 books – I finished at 12. This was just a miserable failure. I was certainly busy but I know for a fact that with time I spent playing through a few video games and watching a number of movies, I could have accomplished this with only consumption time. To be fair, I believe this is the most books I’ve ever read in a year. Last year I read 17 but 6 were audiobooks. I had also strived to read more fiction, which 8 of the 12 were. The complete list includes: The Omnivore’s Dilemma Death on the Nile No Country for