Sydney McLaughlin, dominance reminiscent of Obea Moore

I was just reading an old post where I mentioned the video of Obea Moore with an outstanding anchor leg in a 4x400m relay.  That reminded me of a recent race by Sydney McLaughlin. McLaughlin's performance in this "Swedish Relay" looks even more dominant, starting a 400m quite a ways (>20m) back in 6th place and finishing first by a couple of meters. Also dominant is her earlier state record where literally no one else is in the picture for the last 60m. And neither race was her main event (400m hurdles).

Not quite injured but ...

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a mile on sidewalks on Tuesday and then again on Thursday.  I'm still paying for it with a sore left calf (usually my good side).  Running in grass doesn't cause problems.  Running hills on trails actually helps cure problems.  In general, I need to run hills to keep my legs healthy.  I now need to get conditioned on hills and grass.  At some point, I then will be able to run on the dirt tracks at the high schools.  But it looks like I just need to stay off pavement, at least until I'm in much better condition.  I rode the bike today but I'm trying to get in 3 to 4 days per week on the Whittier hills.

Speaking of the bike, I modified another thing on the Raleigh Twenty since my accident.  I cut the end off some pedals, one of which already had the end broken off.  This made them about 3/4" shorter than the folding pedals that were on the bike.  This will make them less likely to come in contact with the slanted face of the levee, should I ever try that again.  I tried the bike out by hand a couple of times while on my ride to check the clearance.  Right now, it looks like if the uphill pedal is at the bottom of the stroke, it might just barely touch if the bike frame is perfectly upright.  If I try this out while riding, I plan to walk it down the face, then ride it at the bottom of the face and maybe try climbing back up.
So now the changes I've made are

• Put fatter (50x406) tires on the wheels to lift the bike frame about 0.3".
• Replace the rear fixed gear wheel with a coaster brake wheel which 1) allows me to coast and 2) gives me a rear brake.
• Reduce the width of the pedals by about 3/4" which should help hitting the pedal on the sloped surface of the levee. 

The two things I haven't done are

• Change the wheels to 451 rims.  I think this would cost between $100 and $150.  This would only raise the frame at most about 0.7" since the tires will get thinner.  So not yet.
• Change to a 140 mm crankset.  I currently have a 165 mm crankset.  I've used the 140 before on another bike.  The effect of it is that it is harder to pedal and really, the bike needs to be geared down and then pedaled faster.  That's possible but not desirable.

I also have to give credit to my wife.  She doesn't discourage me at all from going back out there and frankly confronting my fears.  She just asks for my expected time to get back home.  And fortunately, she's somewhat trained by ultrarunning where I would underestimate my return time from workouts by hours.

Finally, I'm pretty happy with how my body responded to the crash, if not how my legs respond to pavement.  I felt like I was in a mental fog for about a week which is a lot better than what others report after a concussion.  At least a couple of things actually improved.  Sudoku seemed like a little different game and now it looks like I have improved at it.  Also, I got rid of the bad habit of chewing my nails.  I think my beat up finger was the first thing that stopped me biting my nails, but now my dental hygienist told me that I have a crack in my tooth, so I've put a definite stop to that.

Swifts

I was running laps around the fields behind the Cypress Community Center and Cypress High School.  I was playing around with the route and running on the track (since it wasn't muddy) to make 4 laps add up to 8 miles.  One thing I noticed is that right around the geographical center at the border between the Community Center and the High School, swifts (a bird) would start flying laps around me.  One even flew just a few feet in front of me and they always fly within 3 feet of the ground.
After looking it up, it looks like these were white throated swifts (by a process of elimination).  Including wings, they are about the size of one of my hands with wings that are pointed at the tips and two pointed tips at the two corners of their tail.  When they fly, they are completely silent and maneuver very well.  They stop flying in my vicinity when I'm close to a fence and they don't want to fly through a 5 foot wide gap between me and the fence.
The behavior of most animals seems motivated either by food or by family with a few of the more intelligent animals having food related behavior bordering on play.  Crows for instance take a behavior related to stealing eggs - forcefully dropping an egg to break it - and make it more like playing with a ball.  We've had crows dropping immature persimmon fruit on our roof - we can hear it bouncing and the crows chasing after it.  I once saw some crows that had a round plastic container from a vending machine, dropping the container on the sloping side of a levee and hopping down the levee to keep up with the bouncing plastic ball.
So my first guess at the swift activity was that they were trying to intimidate me by "buzzing" me when I got close to their nest.  After reading about their feeding activity where they catch insects while flying, perhaps they expected me to attract insects (as cattle and horses do) and were hoping to pick up something to eat.  They didn't strike me as intimidating, partially because they fly so low.  Hummingbirds, for instance, buzz people, etc in a definitely intimidating fashion, flying directly overhead.  Hummingbirds also have that diving behavior although that strikes me as mating related.
Anyway, if you have some knowledge of white throated swift behavior or can correct my guesses in some way, I'd like to hear about it.

Progress Against Goals

I mentioned a few goal related things down below.  My progress this week has been to

• Mounted some bicycle chains inside the tire for some added weight and took it out on a local bike path to drag it.  It felt good.
• Ran the aforementioned Workman Hill Traverse repeats more like 26 minutes per repeat rather than the earlier 30 minutes.
• Improved my TVR distance by over a lap this past Saturday.

However, my leg was pretty sore after the last TVR time trial, so I took a day off before today's Workman workout.  I think I'll work more on volume and a little less on intensity.

Those Wacky Vultures!

Well maybe comical, not wacky.  On my way home from Silverado Canyon, right about where I left the walls of the canyon, I saw a vulture, perched on an electrical or phone line.  It wasn't holding its balance that well, wobbling back and forth.  I usually see vultures perched on a tree or something a little more solid.

Usually the way I see vultures is when they are soaring and not flapping their wings at all.  I have seen vultures standing on the ground in the morning with their wings spread in the sun to warm up.  We did see a number of them gliding in to trade opinions about how to open up a dead seal on the beach by Arroyo Grande.

How Goals Work For Me

Yesterday, I was running what I call "Workman Hill Traverses", running over and back Workman Hill in Whittier.  The previous (and only other) time I did this, I quit after 3 over-and-backs since there was a light rain and mud was starting to collect on my shoes (actually Body Glove Realm water socks).  So yesterday I went up with the plan of running 4.

I run these not that fast because I'm not completely over the ITB issues.  For instance when I run now, after a while, it hurts to flex my knee to the maximum extent, but that's not required, so... what.  And later in the day, my knee doesn't hurt.  And yes, I'm (insert usual advice here).

So yesterday, I finished the 3rd one at 1:32:something.  So I started going over goals in my head - maybe next time trying for 2 hours, later on, working up to 5 or 6 over-and-backs in 2 hours (I like 2 hour workouts).  Then I started thinking, maybe I can break 2 this time.  So I wasn't fooling around on the 4th rep but I started pushing a little on the way back and finished under 1:58 and that included picking up some trash on the last descent.

The workout today was a 1 hour run.  We have a group of friends that annually do a one-hour run and mail in the resulting distance, this year by June 14th.  This was my first time trial for the year.  After 2 miles, it was pretty obvious that I wasn't going to make even 6 miles (pretty bad, huh?).  But that is as expected, actually.  Given uninterrupted training, I should be able to hit 7 miles, but not at the moment.  So I thought that 5 3/4 miles was a possibility.  So I kept track of my splits but I actually got slower, slipping from the 10:20's to 10:30's.  But when I finished 5 miles, I had 7:37 remaining in the hour, so possible to get to 5.75 if I could run 10 minute pace.  I ran the last mile in 9:30 and managed 5.75 plus about 73 meters.  Nothing to write home about (blogs are fair game though) but it reminded me that whenever I do this effort, I'm breathing at least a little hard as I did in the last mile. And now the goal for the next time I do this time trial will be 6 miles.

So I set goals during workouts, manage a little extra effort at the end to hit the goal, then use that for the next workout to hit a higher goal.  A typical mind game I played in the past was to calculate the average split from an earlier workout, then try to hit that split for that day's workout.  That would usually result in a faster time for the day.

Signal Hill Plus Tire Pull

It has rained the last two days so the hills in Whittier will build up on the bottom of your shoes for the next few days. Instead, I ran a higher intensity hill workout in/on Signal Hill. Signal Hill is a city entirely within Long Beach, California. It is basically a big hill in the middle of otherwise flat terrain. I was introduced to it by the Long Beach City College track team in the first week or so that I lived in California. I used to be able to run to the first stop sign on Hill Street in a P.R. of 57 seconds. Now, I hope I can break 3 minutes.
This workout started with 8 quick sprints in the grass in the park (which didn't exist long ago). The grass was wet so after 4 sprints, I went barefoot which worked a lot better. After the grass sprints, I put my shoes on and ran the hill 4 times. Back when I could run with more intensity, 2 repeats was pushing it. Today, I could tell I was tired on the 4th repeat. I wasn't sure if I would be able to get through the tire pulls but it turned out not to be a problem. The tire doesn't drag very heavily. It is more of a tool to keep one able to continue to drive. One of the other guys did get curious about the tire so I let him know how the cord attached, etc.
I like this workout because

• I was able to get nice and quick turnover on the grass sprints,
• the hill sprints really tired me out and
• the tire pulls got me to drive, particularly with the right leg.