Author Archives: Matthew Komatsu

Running: 1st Month of The 5k Training Plan for Time Misers

May 15, 2015 By in Reflections on Training, Running Tags: , , 1 Comment
Marine Corps Marathon 2013: On my way to a PR of 2:44. Feels like forever ago.

No chafing here. 

I’m so out of shape, my thighs chafed during my last long run. Yeah. That was humbling. But you gotta start somewhere, and if you buy that, then here’s the start of a simple four month plan for the time-constrained.  We baselined some things last post: time available, setting goals, etc. so I won’t rehash. But not because they’re not important. So make sure you figure those things out before chasing a fast 5k.

CAVEAT: This plan assumes you’re healthy. Fit bill of health and all that. And that you have the sense to dial things back if injuries arise. Alright, enough said, here’s the plan:

1) Enter the next 5k you can find and race your ass off. Even if you’re coming off the couch, it will tell you exactly how long you were there. Race again, once a month. Try to space the races out 3-4 weeks. Note your improvements.

2) Month 1 Quality Workouts (aka “speed work” or “sprints” if you’re an endurance noob) will consist of one of the following. A) 400m repeats, preferably on the track. First week, six repeats with 45s rest (read: light jog) at current 5k pace (not a sprint obviously.) Second week, eight repeats. Third week, ten. Fourth week, twelve. If you miss a week, don’t skip forward. B) One week, 20:00 tempo (add about 15-20s to your 5k pace per mile, should be hard but not killer). Next week, hills of 30s/45s/60s duration with a walk down recovery. Do four sets, and try to extend the distance you cover each set. What that means is that the 30s you run on the last set should cover more ground than on the one prior. Same for the 45 and 60s repeats. *Notice I don’t tell you how to warm up or cool down. In general, warm ups should elevate your heart rate. Cool downs should decrease it. You will figure out what works for you. Some people run 3-5 miles before a track session. Some folks do some push-ups and call it good.

3) Long Run: a lot depends on how fit you start. I’m assuming you’re capable of running a 5k without walking, in 20:00-30:00 minutes. But being able to run 45:00 – 60:00 continuously would be about right for the end of the first month. If you’re coming off the couch, then maybe keep it on the low end. General rule of thumb: 10% increase in distance, per week.

4) What to do with time windfalls: mobility, strength, recovery runs. In that order. I’ll answer any questions in the comments. The focus of this first month is building your work capacity and sense of pacing. If you’re wondering about periodization, we will get to my philosophy on that later.

Reading War: Tobias Wolff’s IN PHAROAH’S ARMY

May 11, 2015 By in Reading, War Tags: , , 2 Comments

x8217You don’t have to get too far into In Pharoah’s Army to realize this isn’t your average Vietnam kill pulp. The memoir of Wolff’s time as an Army Special Forces officer in Vietnam explores all the nooks and crannies of the wartime experience that have nothing to do with combat, saving the kinetic stuff for a kind of sort brief, violent salve. It’s a remarkable book, the first war memoir I read before I knew “war memoir” was a thing.

Anyone who knows Wolff’s other work (say, The Barracks Thief or This Boy’s Life) can attest to his ability to use self-deprecation as a means of parsing the world. But what I found so entertaining about In Pharoah’s Army was the construction of a narrator who was lacking “the courage to admit [his] incompetence…was ready to be killed, even, perhaps, get others killed, to avoid that humiliation.” Wolff’s narrator takes us on a kind of hapless, malingering, and (of course) tragic journey through the Vietnam experience. He’s the antithesis of both the stereotype we apply to today’s Special Forces; he’s also the polar opposite of any kind of war lit hero archetype. It’s fascinating, because unlike Catch-22‘s Yossarian, whose nihilism isolates the character, Wolff’s narrator is quite accessible.

I suppose it might be a little disingenuous to some to compare fictional characters with nonfiction, but we all would do well to recall that any literary character found in either genre is at best, some kind of imagined thing. Any interesting character anyway…

I think it’s fair to call the memoir “essayistic,” with chapters that seem capable of standing as independent stories. The book itself is broken into three large sections that align with pre-, during-, and post-Tet Offensive. Of course, the prose is deft, the narration restrained, and the narrative arcs are controlled. It’s Wolff in the tradition of This Boy’s Life. But now the  boy has gone to war.

The last thing I want to mention in this short post is time. And not in terms of how long it took me to read the book, but how much time elapsed between Wolff’s deployment to Vietnam in 1968, and when he published in 1994. 26 years is a lot of time to sit on this kind of story. In the past decade, war writers of my generation are producing their war memoirs within five years of the experience. I don’t know if this is due to market forces, sharp agents, or editors with chops, but it’s worth noting. They’re putting out memoirs, and not just kill pulp, but real-deal-literature-that-kids-are-gonna-read-in-high-school: it’s coming hard on the heels of what are typically single deployments by non-career servicemen and women.

I don’t bring it up to say that we should be waiting 20+ years to tell our stories. I simply highlight it because it’s a perfect reminder that only the author can say when the story is ready for primetime. Some books probably needed to marinate a bit longer. Others, a bit less. And some, like this one, are just right after waiting a quarter-century’s worth of ripening.

Running: Training Sans Time

May 8, 2015 By in Reflections on Training, Running Tags: , , 1 Comment
Marine Corps Marathon 2013: On my way to a PR of 2:44. Feels like forever ago.

Marine Corps Marathon 2013: On my way to a PR of 2:44. Feels like forever ago.

In the past fifteen months, I’ve had my first child, begun writing again, entered a three year Master’s program, moved, deployed, begun home renovations and continued plugging away at work. I’ve come to the realization that when I used to say that I was busy, what I really meant was that I was “busy frittering away free time.” Time is now a precious commodity.

This is not a challenge unique only to me and my wife. The demands on time, with children or otherwise, are many. It’s safe to say we’re all in some kind of pinch. And the brutal irony of fitness is that gains accumulated over months of training begin to disappear in as little as three days. Which isn’t to say that taking three days off is going to kill your fitness. It just means that the body is always in search of homeostasis. Demand from it, and it will respond. Take that demand away, and it will respond in kind.

When time becomes scarce, we have to make choices regarding training, and it all begins with an honest evaluation of the time you have available to train. Once you do that, here’s what I recommend as a bare-bones, time-constrained training approach:

1) Three runs a week is the absolute minimum. Two of them should be some kind of speed work (intervals, hills, tempo, threshold) and one should be a long run. Some coaches recommend that the long run also include some kind of speed work as well, and in fact, that’s a great way to get more bang for the buck. Scheduling this is on you, but ensure you have at least a day to rest in between the running days. If you have time for more than three runs, you need to add in the following order: core/strength work, mobility/flexibility, and then some additional easy runs to aid recovery and build capacity.

2) Set goals and establish racing milestones.Races are great fitness benchmarks, as well as opportunities to identify our weaknesses. I recommend a training cycle of no less than four months before your goal race, with one race per month beforehand.

3) Have a training schedule: it’s hard to know where you’re going and if you’re going to arrive unless you know how you’re going to get there. Having a weekly schedule will allow you to control your training, make tweaks, and balance time as required. Next week, I’m going to put out a minimalist 5k training schedule that you can use, but there are also a host of other free resources available online, as well as a scad of training books available. All can provide complete training programs.

Let’s face it – few of us can run on four hours of sleep like Dean Karnazes. So it’s important to take an honest evaluation of your time and goals, and come up with a plan from which to vary as necessary. Sure, it’s entirely possible that you might achieve your goals through simply by going out and running, maybe even running hard once or twice. But unless you’re quite literally coming off the couch, that’s a low probability outcome. And odds are good that you’re actually spending more time doing something you didn’t need to do, when you could have achieved the same result with less time doing what you ought to do.