VO2 Max WoG-BQ Challenge
I've appreciated Scott 2 starting this thread and the chance to see up close the grind, the setbacks, lessons learned & leaps forward of training in his and others' stories shared here. This week I started putting together my own training schedule for the summer and I figured I'd start posting here, not for encouragement which I prefer to self-generate, but for accountability and to test in public a hypothesis: Can I get top octile amateur-bracket running results with a woefully light dedicated training schedule, thanks to a little ERE web-of-goals kicker? Specifically I would like to see if I can qualify for a Boston marathon within a couple of years running only 3-4 days a week, averaging out (year-round) to a commitment of something in the neighborhood of a (quite skewed) 4 hours/wk.
This is bordering on the ridiculously low side for serious hobby runners. I have caregiving responsibilities that mean I can duck out to run in circles for hours only a few times a week. But my ERE 'hack' here is to harvest a substantial and regular contribution of sufficiently long zone 1/zone 2 exercise via a steady cadence of cycling for various errands and commutes on the other days which will roughly double overall training time in the training period. I'll give further details as I get my training going. [Also, for the inverse, I will track how I am able to harness my dedicated training time to other goals: transportation-related ones clearly, but also social benefits, local knowledge, and single-pointed mindfulness & breath awareness training. We'll see.]
Running history: Don't particularly mind running. Not a whole lot of practice. Some team sports/training background, lots of hiking, fortunate to have little excess weight (e.g. muscle) to drag along, but have always felt bad for joggers having neither teammates nor a ball to chase, then ran first marathon in my 40s not too long after re-retiring (so having no excuse) when I was invited to train for one with an acquaintance [never managed to meet up together; he quit 3 weeks in]. Barely, barely broke 4 hours. Time passed until last year, when questioning my general fitness with nothing specific or measurable to anchor a rebuttal, decided I'd try to start a running habit and run another marathon wherein I managed to improve by twenty minutes with my primary training improvement being tracking my pace and my chief race-time innovation was not walking.
I picked up a GPS watch which is 12 years old and does not have inboard pulse or VO2 max estimation; I do check pulse, using a finger. I know this is a VO2 Max thread so just so I don't get asked to leave, I'll put in my current VDOT (another contribution to approximating a pseudo-VO2Max in the vein of a Cooper test, only time-indexed for standard running distances instead of the 12 minute elapsed run. You can check out
VDOT tables and there are a number of online calculators that haven't been nastygrammed offline yet. I come in somewhere around 43. Using (the creator of VDOT) Jeff Daniels' age-adjusted tables (in his book), that puts me on the lowish side of Intermediate for my age.
As has been noted, these levels are age-constrained, so my VDOT will inevitably go down. Whether I am more uncomfortable with the difficulty in accurately age-adjusting the concave down and disturbingly steep
curves upthread or the demotivating aspect of guaranteed decline... well.. I will say I do feel lucky to have started running late in life where I don't realize how slow the numbers I'm putting up actually are. Joy of running as it may be, it probably takes a little something to not mind running twice as slow a pace as you once did.
At any rate, so as not to be the tale of the decline and fall of my diminishing VO2 max, I am going to borrow the nicely age-adjusted metric and notation of Boston qualifying times which for my cohort puts me currently at BQ+18 min thus motivating my goal to hit BQ+0. Yes I can improve simply by aging. I may not get faster, but I know I can get older.