Running "stadiums" in Ben Hill Griffin at Florida Field

At the gym, there is the Stairmaster and then there is the Stairmaster Gauntlet. If you've not seen these two torture devices, the former has levers that go up and down to simulate climbing stairs while the latter is basically a 'treadmill' of stairs that rotate around underneath you on a belt so that you must truly climb stairs. If I have my choice though, I prefer to do such workouts at the local football stadium.

In Gainesville, Ben Hill Griffin stadium at Florida Field (links to Wikipedia and the UF Athletic Association) has ninety rows of bleachers in the East stands, which are the student sections. This picture gives you a little of an idea what it looks like from the West stands looking East when the stadium is empty.

Copyright courier-journal.com

The UF Athletic Association allows the public to access the stands (not the field) through most of the day. They open it around 7AM, so I cannot workout there before work, but the afternoons are great. "Running stadiums" is quite a popular workout for college students and locals, and there are several ways you can do them. The lower 30 rows are a little deeper and less steep. You can probably appreciate from the picture that the upper 60 rows are much more steep. Some restrict themselves to just the lower 30 or upper 60. Some run up and down the stairs, personally, I prefer to go up and down all 90 rows speed-walking the bleachers themselves. You can run them if you choose, but be prepared to be exhausted after just a few runs. If you walk them, you can expect to have jelly legs within about 10 cycles.

I cannot seem to find any stats about the stairs or the height of the stadium online, so the next best estimate I have is from my Garmin. Those with Garmin devices know that they are imprecise, but the estimate I get is that the rise from the bottom of the East stands is somewhere around 130 feet up divided by 190 feet across, therefore a percent grade of 68% (somewhere around 30 degrees slope).

The Bruce Protocol

If your doctor ever suggests that you need to have a 'stress test' to check on your heart, it is very likely that you will end up on a treadmill, hooked up to many wires and tubes. Someone will be there monitoring your every heartbeat and documenting your response to the exercise.

The most commonly used protocol is called the Bruce. According to Wikipedia, it was developed by Robert Bruce, as an attempt to standardize the measurement of responses to exercise. You may be interested to know, however, that these tests usually do not require any running (most patients stop before stage 4). The speed and elevation of the treadmill follows a precise protocol, which, for Bruce, starts with walking at 1.7 miles per hour and 10% grade.

The purpose of this test, of course, is to test people who are having symptoms like chest pain and shortness of breath. Aside from that, though, it can be used as a surrogate for estimating VO2 max (maximal oxygen consumption). This, in turn, is a measure of cardiovascular fitness because it represents how much oxygen you are able to consume and transfer to your muscles to burn in aerobic exertion. The ideal way of measuring VO2 max is by directly measuring how much oxygen you inhale and exhale during exertion, but if you have access to a treadmill and can run the Bruce, there are calculations for estimating your VO2 max.

So, last month, after the marathon I figured I would give it a shot. Obviously, the first three stages or so were just a walk, an uphill walk, but nothing challenging. The next couple of stages actually were quite awkward because they are in that speed where it feels very weird to walk that fast, but it is not quite fast enough to run. By the time I got to stage 6, I was definitely running the entire time and it was very challenging. I was seriously sucking wind, but my legs were not that tired, which is the purpose of the test after all. 

While this is meant as a test of maximal exertion, clearly you have to recognize when you think you are at 99% so that someone else can shut off the treadmill. This can be hard, because you can imagine that you could always go another 5, 10, maybe 15 seconds more. When I got in sight of 24 minutes though, I figured that would be a nice even number and I was barely able to get enough air to tell someone to shut it off for me, so I figure that is pretty close to maximal. 

So, with a 24 minute run on the Bruce, my VO2 max is estimated at 75! Somehow I kind of doubt that actually, seeing as how Lance Armstrong's is reported somewhere in the 80's. Also, for the Bruce protocol programmed at my hospital, the speed and elevation are fixed after stage seven, where the true maximal test continues to increase. The calculators I found expect the true maximal test, so they are probably an overestimation.

There are some other estimates of VO2 max which do not require a treadmill:

• Cooper test: Take the distance you can run in 12 minutes (for me, about 2 miles or 3,218 meters) subtract 500 and divide by 45. This estimates my VO2 max at 60.2.
• Pedersen estimate: Take your max exertional HR (195), divide by your resting HR (55), and multiply by 15. My estimate is 53.2.

Five Points of Life Results

February 20 was a great morning for a half marathon. Temperature at race start (7 AM) was about 54 F. My only problem is that the start is set up such that the marathon and half runners are staggered physically, but not by time. Since we start together, those of us near the front of the half group had to run through or, in many cases around, the marathoners to get some open space for our start. Once in the open, the race was really fun. The crowd support is sparse (Gainesville is small), but people are enthusiastic. Of course with Gainesville being small, you also sometimes get to see people you know that you were not expecting to see (go Team Hot Legs!).

The hills on the course are concentrated in the first half. This year, having run lots of hill repeats preparing for Boston, the hills were no problem for me. That said, my quads were pretty tired towards the end and I was thankful that the last half actually has a lot of gentle downhills to keep my splits fast. The run through the stadium was less impressive this year since they were showing highlights on the TVs, but they did not use the PA system.

At the 12 mile marker, I had a full ten minutes to spare for my goal of sub-1:30. I settled into a steady pace and overtook one or two people who had burned out, until, of course, some guy came out of nowhere and flew past me. No worries, I achieved my goal with an unofficial 1:27:23 making me third in my age group and finishing 22nd overall!

Half marathon winner came in around 1:06 and the marathon winner was a 2:40. The top marathon relay team ran a 3:13, which bummed me out since our team last year ran 3:11! Next year hopefully we can drum up more interest. Pictures to follow soon.
Pictures and official results to follow in the near future.

Hill work, beyond the dreadmill

Never been a big fan of hill work, but if I am going to tackle Boston in 2011, I would be a fool to not incorporate some during training. At present, I am working on my base, trying to keep up a solid ~30 miles a week and mix in a variety of styles and workouts to keep it fresh and get used to training beyond slogging away at the pavement, ie: Fartleks, barefoot/minimal, and hills.

Now, most of the "hill" training I've done has been on the dreadmill. That is partially because the act of changing speeds and grades has helped to minimize the monotony of indoor running. Also, it can be hard in Florida to find decent hills to run. A recent trick I learned from Andy, Florida Ultrarunner of the Year (over at http://intheslam.blogspot.com/) is to try bridges, since Florida seems to have more of those than hills. That said, Gainesville has few of either. Now, there is the "bacon strip", as described in  "Once a Runner" set in the fictional town of Kernsville (Gainesville), but that stretch is out several miles from campus and I am usually on a tight schedule. But then I remembered "cardiac hill" over by Shands. Silly of me to forget, of course, since I went to college here and presently work at Shands, but anyway.

The hill is located near the eastern edge of the medical campus and runs from the MacKnight Brain Research Institute, north up to Museum Drive which is sort of the southern border of the 'main' part of UF's campus. It is steep enough that bicyclists easily break the 20 mph campus speed limit coming down, but few are energetic enough to ride up it between classes. The other day I decided to run from my car (a half mile warm up) to the hill and then run repeats until I got to about 4 miles of distance and call it a day. There is a flat area of road at the base of the hill which makes a suitable area to turn around and get ready for the next repeat. In total, the distance for each repeat is about 0.4 miles, with the hill proper being 0.11 miles or 580 feet. I have used a couple of different website to find the elevation necessary to calculate the grade of the hill. My standby is http://www.mapmyrun.com/, but periodically, the elevation charting is broken. After a little google search, I found that the USATF  site also has an elevation chart, but it is not as robust a mapping system as mapmyrun. That site say that "cardiac hill" rises 41 feet over 0.11 miles. So, percent grade equals rise over run x 100. 41 / 580 * 100 = 7.06% grade. Going back to my post about hills in Tallahassee, It would appear that this hill is not as long, but steeper than the infamous hills of Newton. Hopefully this should suffice to strengthen the quads and hammys for Boston!

The Hills of Tallahassee, a closer look

After writing yesterday's post about my WWHM in Tallahassee, I thought twice about the hills I was running. I looked at the elevation maps from mapmyrun.com and was a little suprised to see that the steepest grade was only about 2-3%. I shrugged it off, but it was nagging me today when I ran 6 over some similar terrain.

I came back home to check it out and realized I was overlooking some artifacts of the website's calculations. It takes the whole distance of your run and divides it into several segments regardless of the length of the run. IE: a thirteen mile run with 13 segments only has a resolution of 1 mile per segment, versus selecting just the hill itself, which then gets divided into 10 sections and your resolution is more like 0.01-0.02 miles per segment.




Sure enough, there is a good sized hill in the Goodwood neighborhood that I frequently run up. It is only 0.36 miles long, but the max grade is 17%!!




Likewise, this hill on Miccosukee Road is 1/4 mile, with max grade of 8%.




This last hill goes South on Blairstone past the Governor's Square Mall and rises 135 feet in 0.62 miles. That calculates to an average grade of 4.1%, which looks close to what mapmyrun.com calls it, on average.

I was trying to find more precise stats yesterday on the hills of Newton on the Boston course and while boston.com has a lot of info about the course, elevations, etc.; it does not specifically mention the elevations or grades/distance of each hill. The other sources I found suggest that Heartbreak and the others are on par with this one on Blairstone, except of course that there are four of them, and they come 20-ish miles into the marathon course. Can't wait!