March update

I ran a 15k on Sunday in 1:08:05, twenty seconds slower than my PR, so the PR table doesn't need to be updated.  I have a 10k in a week and a half; my PR there is 45:33, and I had thought of aiming at 43:30, viz. 7:00 a mile, before I looked at this:

What I've done here is to take the complete race results for 11 races over the past 53 weeks and look for runners who ran in more than one of the races and compared the performances in the different races. A typical runner who ran about 1:07:50 in last year's 15k and 1:07:51 in this year's — that's pretty close to my numbers — ran about 44:37 in this 10k race last year.  This (hypothetical) runner ran 20 seconds slower than I did in the 5k three weeks ago, and a minute slower in the Staten Island half marathon (in which I ran a perfect race), so maybe I could run 12 seconds per mile faster on this course if the weather is good, but it was 52 degrees last year; I know what slowed people down was the hills at the north end of the park.

I may be in better shape for shorter races right now than for longer races, but I'm kind of thinking I should go out at a 7:05 or 7:10 pace, hopefully set myself up to beat my PR, and see whether I feel after the hills like I have the reserves to pick up the pace at that point.

running update

As mentioned in my last update, I had been feeling a bit sore and hadn't been running as much; after the half marathon, I went almost a month with basically no running, during which I got sick and went on my honeymoon, both of which seemed like excuses to let my legs heal. I'm back up to 20 miles a week or so — I've run more than twice as far in the first half of March as I did in all of February, and plan to pass January's total on Thursday. I have a 15k race in less than 2 weeks. A bit over a week ago I ran a 5k race, in which I beat the PR I set in 1992:

I suppose my primary goal for the 15k is 1:07:44, with lesser goals at 1:06:12 (which would beat the m^1.07/s from October's half marathon) and 1:05:14 (which would beat 7 minutes per mile), but I think I'm in rather worse shape than I was last October, and, in regards to that last potential goal, I should note that, as of the morning of March 6, I had never run any race longer than a mile at a 7 minute pace.  Doing so at a 15k distance feels, for the time being, a bit out of reach.  At my current fitness level, 1:07:44 seems ambitious enough.

I ran a half marathon in Central Park on Saturday. It was 14 degrees. I've been a bit injured for almost a month, so I haven't been doing as many miles as I would have liked, or any speed work (until today), so after I got the feeling back in my toes and got into the hang of it, I decided to aim at a 1:45 finish time. I got there in 1:44:56.

The vertical axis is pace; the horizontal is time. Up is slow; the lines are 7, 8, and 9 minutes per mile. After I got warmed up, I approach 9 minutes per mile on three occasions; those are all at least partly related to walking through water stations. (Not that I did that at a 9 minute pace, but this is smoothed, though, in some ways, perhaps not enough; I imagine some of the high-frequency ripples are imprecision in the satellite watch, though some of the other ripples are more likely related to my varying levels of focus and to hills.)

Just because I'm enjoying this, here's today's run.  It's a bit over 5 miles, and the bottom three lines are again 7, 8, and 9 minute miles.  There were five speed sessions, not including the last 300 yards, when I decided to pick it back up again.  I cut the second speed-up short when I came to unshoveled sidewalk -- it snowed this morning, and more is coming tonight -- but when I got to unshoveled sidewalk in the third speed-up, I kept going, albeit at a slower speed.  The speed sessions were often followed by several seconds of walking; sometimes they were followed by waiting for a stoplight, though.

In addition to the weather, my legs aren't really healthy enough for a lot of speed work; we'll see how they feel tomorrow.  Right now I don't expect to be running a lot of miles until late February.

very hypothetical nfl playoffs

Imagine that my end-of-regular-season ratings were used to seed playoffs; the highest ranked team in each division gets a spot, as do the next two highest-ranked teams in each conference, and the seeds are then in order of ranking.  (It happens that the first rule selects 7 of the 8 teams that officially won their division; the exception is Baltimore over Pittsburgh by 0.01 rating points, which the NFL decided the other direction based on division record.)  The highest ranked teams excluded are #9 Tampa Bay and #12 Miami.

How would that have played out?  Well, the Packers play Philadelphia at home and the Bears host Seattle; the latter actually took place in the real playoffs, and the Packers won at Philadelphia, so I retain those winners.  In the AFC, Indianapolis plays at the Jets and Kansas City at Pittsburgh; since these two road teams lost at home in the playoffs, I'll also pick the home teams in those match-ups.  The next round then features New England hosting the Jets, Atlanta hosting Green Bay, and New Orleans hosting Chicago.  Two of those match-ups also took place, so I've filled in the winners.  Baltimore-Pittsburgh shows up here, but with Baltimore hosting; how big a difference would home field advantage have made?  I'd pick Chicago at New Orleans, too, especially knowing what we know now, but how much of New Orleans's collapse at Seattle was due to the venue? 

Either way, the winners of these ambiguous games host the conference championships.  This is what I have; you can fill in blanks on your own as you wish:

NFL ratings

After the divisional round. Packers at the Bears, Jets at the Steelers next week.