Kris Freeman

Right now I’m sitting in my office and the heat of the day is just starting to find its way into the building. Kris is some number of hours into a planned six hour OD running session, someplace equally hot (it’s currently 91 degrees at Laconia airport).

Kris plans his training in stages. Each three week block has an overall set of priorities established in advance. The specifics are planned usually a week or ten days in advance, with the major sessions put into place along with any planned travel or distraction. The minor stuff can fill in around the edges. But by the time a plan is put into place to include an intensity session, back to back ODs, a friend’s wedding, a seven mile running race, and another double century, the situation starts to get less flexible. So when Kris called yesterday and mentioned that his back to back six hour ODs were scheduled for the hottest two days on the forecast he was already prepared to go ahead with the plan and make the best of it. We’ll see what that means when Kris calls to report later today.

My last post was a report on Kris’s first mega-OD of the year - a 200 mile bike ride on Tuesday. Things have gone well since then. He had a couple of relatively easy days after the long ride, but was back to a 4.5 hour double-pole OD on Friday which felt great. In the last post I mentioned that the weekend would be “low-key”, and it was. However, it did involve a sustained threshold intensity effort for 55 minutes on Sunday. Given that the previous week had involved 30.5 hours with a 10 hour bike ride, Kris’s report from the intensity session was that he felt better than he had any business feeling. This is encouraging, of course. One interesting side note is that Kris finds it easier to sustain a “threshold” workload of around 162 beats per minute (max HR is low to mid 180s, resting HR as low as 28) when he’s running uphill than on a flat. Given how high his threshold workload is, I suspect that this is because the range of motion required at that speed on the flat is outside of his familiar comfort zone. With a little bit of speed work he could clearly be more efficient on the flats, and probably a whole lot faster in your average road race.

Speaking of which, Kris planning to run a seven mile road race on July 4th. This’ll be an interesting test, but somewhat limited in what it can tell us. We already know his workload capacity is increasing at a good rate from the Sunapee time trial. We also know that his economy running on the flats isn’t great. There’s no reason at all to expect a very fast time from Kris - he simply hasn’t trained the leg speed. However, this course does feature a long sustained climb of about a mile and a half in the middle of the race. That, along with the length of the event, will play to his advantage. More than anything else, this will be valuable because it will be a competition. And Justin will be there. And Justin has been training his leg speed (such as it is). This session does not represent any kind of training goal, and we’ve got no set of meaningful criteria by which to assess success or failure aside from Kris’s finishing time as it compares to Justin’s time. It’s just an intensity session at a higher level than his regular threshold sessions. Three days later it’s back on the bike for the second and last 200 mile ride of the season.