Moving Forward

Lori, Thank you for the words of encouragement. The race was fun and anytime on Leg 33 is a good time. Just being able to say you survived it is accomplishment enough. Congrats on your WBR finish. By the way what do you sculpt?

Adam,

Thanks for the congrats! I was very happy to finish! I hope that if I do this angain I can improve my times.

I don't usually say to much about what I sculpt. Because people usually give me a funny look when I tell them. But since I can't see the look you will give me I guess I will tell. I sculpt one-of-a-kind dolls. They range in size from a small 6 inch fairy, small and life scale babies, to a life size witch that stands on my porch at Halloween. Currently I'm tring to engineer a ball jointed doll.

If you have a website with pictures of your creations you should post it on your blog, free advertisement... Good luck with your running and your art.

What were your splits on each leg? Kory and Adam ran your legs on our two teams, so we can do a decent fitness estimate based on what you got. Also, how did your team finish?

You can actually hyperlink your doll sculpture site from the blog. Highlight by dragging the mouse over the text, then click on the icon with the world in the editor and type in the full URL of the link (http://www.lorimetcalfdolls.blogspot.com). This could actually help you up your Google rankings, and I do not mind at all when real runners (not spammers that set up a blog just for this purpose) use the blog this way.

Sasha,

Thanks for showing me how to link my blog, I'm not real good with that stuff on computers. My son-in-law was the one who helped set up my blog.

I hate to post my times from WBR because everyone here did such a great job, and I kept forgetting to start my watch when I was running, so I will have to estimate my times.

Leg 1 - 28 min

Leg 2 - 57 min

Leg 3 - 60 min.

My team was the Crash Dummies (Autoliv Team) our total time was 29:33. When I looked out on the site to see our time, it looked like we placed about the middle of the pack.

It is VERY important never to be ashamed of your time. Especially when comparing to others. We all run and that is what unites us. I try to always just run against myself and that is all you can ask. Keep up the hard work and that is a great effort up that hill for your 3rd leg!

Lori - some number crunching. We will use Adam as a base to evaluate the relative difficulty of the legs. The reason being is that he is a fairly consistent runner, and when things go wrong they will never go too wrong. And when they go right, they cannot go too right on just one leg. On the first leg your speed ratio was 1.47. On the second leg it was 1.54, and on the third leg it was 1.83. To put things in perspective. Adam can run about 1:15 half marathon on a flat course at 4500 feet in ideal conditions. If you were to maintain the speed ratio of the first leg, that gives you 1:50, second leg, 1:55, and third leg 2:17.

So the good news is that you should be able to run a flat half at altitude somewhere between 1:50 and 1:55. Possibly faster because I imagine Adam would have been more aggressive from the gun relative to his half-marathon race pace in his early legs and we are not taking that into account.

The mystery is in the a breakdown of some kind on the third leg. One issue was the heat - Adam ran that leg around 9:00 AM, you were probably there around 12 or 1, so it was a lot warmer. Because you were running longer, the heat would have affected you more than it would have affected Adam even if he had to run it at the same time. Another issue is being a male under 30 he would tend to lose less from a steep grade, there is a fairly strong correlation between the explosive power of the muscle and the ability to sustain speed on a steep uphill (not just run at fast speed, but run at a higher percentage of your flat speed). It was a third leg, and he runs higher mileage, so he should be losing relatively less from the fatigue. I would also expect less neural sleep-deprivation fatigue from a male under 30 than a female master, so that is a factor also. So this increased gap is probably to be expected, but so far you are the only data point in the 4:00 marathon range we can analyze, so we are still learning. However, one benefit is that with the data you posted we can now help all teams in your range plan their legs.

Sasha, Your attention to detail and critical thinking is always an inspiration. I'm glad you chose me to compare to because it helped me put things into perspective as well.

Lori, I'm glad you added the link to your dolls. They look great. The detail is amazing. I didn't look extensively but did you have the life size one on there as well?