Or the energy and water cost of having your…ahem…ego stroked
Ya…I do wonder about that water and energy cost. I hope I am not destroying the planet since I have been slowly trying to get up to speed on Chat over the past 6-months. It has been a great sounding board and has been very objective. I did like the insight on the training. It defiantly provided some insight and guidance that I wouldn’t have had otherwise and did provide some confidence that the plan I am following is a good fit.
Careful falling for the scarcity traps that demagogues have have used to create contention since time immemorial. It’s especially ironic considering we now actually understand this thing called the water cycle. That so many get sucked into arguments about a disappearing resource when instead we should simply be calling for more retention, storage, and recycling facilities.
Case in point, many people freak out about data centers being built in Phoenix, and point to everything from energy to water. Most people don’t realize Phoenix recycles 90+% of its water.
There’s always more we could do. I wish instead of weird no-growth arguments, people simply looked at the engineering problems and asked the questions of how can we grow our resources instead of restricting our growth.
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I am not saying that ai has no reasonable applications that are worth an environmental impact, but having an imaginary friend pat you on the back for your running isn’t one of them.
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Hah. No. Hard disagree. That’s like saying our GPS watches giving us pacing are wasteful use of precious resources, we should just use a Timex right? Nah, some say, if you can’t feel your pace from your heart beat….
Laggards holding progress back should always be listened to in order to strive for efficiently maximizing resources but never given the final say. The scarcity cool aid is sweetened with zero calorie junk. Stay away from it.
Have you considered an Olympic Iong jump career with that sort of leap?
Have your privilege and strawman - best of luck to OP with his training.
I’m more of a Woody Harrelson than a Wesley Snipes.
Isn’t that what WE are? LOL
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So…I did my 12 week of base/build before going into an 18-week training plan. I just wrapped up week 12 of the the 18-week plan. So…after 24 weeks the final 6-week stretch in in sight.
Everything went well until I started to do 20+ mile long runs. Most of the log runs have some type of race pace or tempo work inside of them. Slow and easy probably would have been manageable but with the intensity I found that my quads would be screaming after 17-18 miles. After a 22-mile run at marathon pace + 60-sec/mi that wiped me out I decided to do the 24-mile run that was two week later with the run-walk-run method. The 24-mile run was prescribed at 15 sec/mile faster than the 22-miler. With the run-walk-run I would be running 40 sec/mi faster than the 22-mile but then take a 30-sec walk break every 5’30”. The 24-mile went great. I hit every mile split right on pace and after 23 miles I was thinking to myself that I should probably just go the full 26.2 today since I feel so good (but I didn’t).
The 24-miler went so well that I decided to do a run-walk-run for the 18-miler the next week. The 18-miler was a 6-mile warmup, 6-mile @ 5-10 sec/mile faster than marathon pace, 6-mile cool down. I had been failing on the sub-race-pace work in the long run so I have been pushing those workouts out to race pace. With the run-walk-run I was at 30-sec/mi under race pace for 6 minutes followed by a 30 seconds walk. I got through the 6-miles at sub-race pace work staying on target pace, but after 6-miles were done my quads aching and the 6-mile cool down was a death march. I am feel really over spent. I think that is how you are supposed to feel 5-6 weeks out from your race when you are hitting your peak training miles. I going to ease up on the intensity though and focus on nailing the volume the next few week. I am not going to loose any of my speed in 6 weeks but trashed quads after every interval workout and long run are not going to be helpful in the final stretch.
Hmm? What I am going to do after this Marathon? The USAT Nationals in Milwaukee in August looked exciting. I better get through one thing at a time first.
If it’s me I’d have a different take. No more runs over 15 miles, and focus on quality sessions broken up into intervals that vary between 10k, HM and Marathon Pace depending on the day/week(obvious have some easy recovery runs in between). Maybe only 2 more 15 milers between now and the race and have those be about 10k at MP with the rest easy endurance pace.
If you want to have a 2 hour plus aerobic activity 4 week out from a marathon, my thought is to do it on the bike trainer..
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I am built like a miler. I can knock out a 10 x 800m workout at 2:45 intervals without a problem. A 5K is a little outside my comfort zone though. Endurance is where I need to focus. Yes, I think the long rides on the bike trainer are a good idea. 
I pretty much agree with Lurker, but I would say up to 2:30 is okay if you really feel like you need time on your feet.
I’ve done training plans with long runs as long as a 22 miles and as short as 16. Training runs that are so long they trash your body for days (or cause injury) are counterproductive overall, imo.
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My interval days are typically 12 miles done as 2-4 mile warm up, 4-7 miles of sub-threshold intervals and recovery intervals (i.e. 5 x 1600m w/ 400m RI, or 6 x 1000m, or descending 3-mile/2-mile/1-mile), and 2-3 cool down. My interval load is too high to be sustained by just three runs a week. The long runs are the meat of the program. I cut yesterday’s 20-mile run with 14-miles at marathon pace down to 18 miles with 3x4 miles at marathon pace. I also to calories every 25 minutes instead of every 50 minutes. I nail all the goals for the run and it felt easy again. I am now thinking refueling has been my biggest issue on the long runs. :-/
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At some point during the last marathon I trained for I realized refueling was a game changer. It’s funny how you can do this for so long and the light bulb eventually goes on. I should have known what to do, but I never actually implemented it.
Your long run/workout (the modified one) looks great to me. I trained for my last marathon doing nothing but sub-threshold workouts and a few long runs (18-20 miles) and it worked well.
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Is any different then snacking on almonds? Almond farming uses significantly more water than chatting with an LLM.
You’re assuming I snack on almonds now?
Even if I did, my body requires food. It doesn’t require an imaginary friend to be my cheerleader.
Nice whataboutism, though - an LLM suggest that for you?
No. It was just to illustrate scale. People frequently bring up water consumption and it’s 1000s of times less than many activities. I’d say it is a bigger whatabout. Energy consumption is real but people are too zero sum to realize that the capital available for growing data centers is real and could be used to revive clean energy sources and infrastructure improvements that are needed.
While the positive nature of an LLM isn’t necessarily needed for the running use case, practicing with an LLM on a topic that is of interest for you is a good way to gain experience with it. Research has shown that there is a learning curve. So not sure why you felt the need to inject negativity in the conversation.
Where do Sour Patch Kids fall, in the spectrum between Almond Orchards and Data Farms?
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