Wikinews, the collaborative news site by the Wikipedia folks, has a Q&A interview of Emily Levan, the top U.S. woman’s finisher in the Boston Marathon on Monday.
I’m guessing the author isn’t a big runner, perhaps not a runner at all, but it’s a cool interview that goes into Levan’s training:
And how many miles a week were you doing–I assume you peaked somewhere right before the marathon.
At the peak, I have a month or six week period where I’ve built up to my peak training, and I was probably doing between 90 to 100 miles a week.
Was there a lot of variation in your day to day mileage, or was it pretty much you’re doing 1/7th of that mileage every day?
There’s definitely variation, probably more so in the type of workout that i did each day. For example two days a week I would do a speed workout, so I might be doing mile repeats, which just means that I do a mile in a specific time, and then I might jog for a couple minutes and then another one and another one. I’d do a series of eight mile repeats on that specific workout day. My other speed workout would be a marathon pace run, so I might run 8 or 10 miles at my marathon pace. If my marathon pace is 6 minute miles, I’d do a two mile jog warm up, and then I might do 8 or 10 miles at a six minute pace, and then a two mile cooldown.So you maybe end up running 14?
Sometimes what I would do on those speed workout days– on those days I might end up with about 14 miles. On some other days, I might run twice during the course of the day. Say in the morning, I might run eight miles, and then in the afternoon I might do six or eight more miles.
Hi Derek,
Glad you liked the interview– transcribing it took a long time. You are correct that I am not a big runner– I’m more of a fan of big runners. I watched Alex Tilson set a world record at the Silicon Valley Speedster Ultra Classic (http://www.hogue.com/svclassic/index2002.html) a few years ago, and I was hooked.
Pingswept (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Pingswept)
Hey Pingswept, thanks for the comment! I woulda sent you an email, but didn’t see an address. As a runner who is also a “professional” journalist, (err, well, I get a paycheck), I found the article interesting on two counts.
Here’s a question – I’m sure transcribing it did take a long time. So why’d you do it? That’s a sincere question; I’m just curious.
Hi Derek,
Why did I do it:
That’s a decent question. Generally, because I’m hopeful that Wikinews can take off and set a new standard for what journalism is. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and right now, I have trouble getting good local news. The local TV news is short bits: “A man buries himself in a sarcophagus in his basement, and police want to know why. Now, this.” There are two local papers– one has just arts coverage. The other has two writers (as far as I can tell). They’re decent, but they’re only two people. I think this is a widespread condition.
In the case of the Emily Levan interview, I’m sort of an acquaintance of hers, so it’s fun to write about someone you know. On the other hand, I also did an email interview with a guy in Tanzania, and I’d never heard of him before the interview. I didn’t need to transcribe the interview, but the article still took some research.
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/First_Swahili_office_suite_released_in_Dar_es_Salaam,_Tanzania)
I still can’t believe that 50 million Swahili speakers got their first office suite, and it got ZERO coverage in the English press. There was some coverage of a beta release, but even that was just two or three British websites.
Pingswept (at yahoo.com)