Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Welcome to the Show - Keith Mulhollon - joins ThunderDome Racing

It was a busy week for the ThunderDome Running race team.  ThunderDome added one of the top Master's runners in the United States to the race team - Keith Mullhollon from Lake Geneva, WI.  Keith and I traveled to Cedar Rapids to race in the CVRA 5th Season Races - the Alliant Energy 8k. It was a stacked field and temps/humidity were high, but hey you know what you are getting when you line it up to race on July 4 in the midwest.

Keith raced to a 23rd place overall finish and won the male master's top spot racing a solid 25:41 8k.  I ended up running 24:49 and finished 16th overall.
If you are interested in joining the ThunderDome Racing team please feel free to email us at info@thunderdomerunning.com.
 

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

A Little Running Math Problem/Contest...Help!

Runners like to be precise and not cut corners really in anything we do.  You know before GPS/Garmin's or Map My Run...you just sometimes kind of had to guess on your route distances hoping the routes were the actual distance you logged for like a couple of years before you had a true measurement.  I just got back from vacation and some altitude training in Crested Butte, Colorado at 9000 feet where I did a 400m (or close to it) workout where I finished feeling guilty.


I was able to get in some fun and tough training in the mountains of Crested Butte, CO. The town had an asphalt track at the high school which was perfect because there were a couple of races coming up on my race schedule so I wanted to get in something quicker even though it would be more challenging at altitude.

The workout was 12 x 400m on 60 seconds rest.  During the warm-up I had the GPS/Garmin out to kind of make sure the track was pretty close to 1/4 mile (not an exact measurement either but that is all I had to go by), with the first measure I found the track turned out to be short on the regular markings on one lap being short of 400m so I added on a bit just to make sure the distance was covered in each interval and began the workout.  The workout ended up going well and was happy with the effort and result ending up averaging 66.3 per repeat.  I was suspect about things though so I re-measured the track after the workout and my interval markings ended up being about (16 feet) short/under 1/4 mile per interval for the intervals I ran.

The blog question of the day and your chance to get some free swag (ThunderDome T shirt) is as follows.  With the intervals being 16 feet short of an actual 1/4 mile, how many meters on each repeat did I actually do when converted to meters? Was the workout like 12 x 390m or 12 x 375m or was it pretty close to 400m based on the 1/4 mile distance compared to a 400m track interval?  I am looking for the actual meter repeat distance......first correct answer wins. 

Good Luck