Running Chick

All day today, I’ve been feeling like I have a hangover. Thanks Daylight Savings Time! I suppose it didn’t help that I didn’t get to bed until after 1:00AM and the alarm was blaring at 4:30 so Josh could get his butt to the airport in time for his 6:00 flight to Amherst, MA. At least I got to go back to sleep.

I dragged myself out of bed at 9:00 (which was 8:00 according to my body) and sucked down the coffee until the cobwebs dissipated enough for me to throw on some running clothes and head out the door. My schedule called for a short, easy run, but my body wasn’t too cooperative. I think it was pretty ticked off at me for running five miles on Saturday, and then blowing off my usual post-run stretching routine for a four-hour uncomfortable car ride. Josh and I had spent the previous three days shopping and bumming around Appleton, WI on a short vacation and Josh wheeled and dealed himself a new truck (I don’t want to steal his thunder, so hop over to his blog for the details). We were picking up the truck at 10:30AM on our way out of town, and I had to get my five miler in before we checked out of the hotel, so we were cutting it pretty close by the time we finally got back, thus stretching was skipped. Not the best idea I’ve ever had, today my legs were tight and hurt. Thanks to some ibuprofen, ice packs and 45 minutes of yoga, they’re feeling pretty good now. Tonight I’ll bust out the foam roller and maybe do some very light yoga to get the final kinks out.

I did two runs while we were in Appleton. Three miles on Thursday morning and five on Saturday. Our hotel was close to the mall and the area wasn’t very runner friendly (lots of traffic, no sidewalks) so we headed downtown. Josh drank coffee and used the wi-fi in Brewed Awakenings while I did my thing. Thanks to downtown Appleton having an awesome sidewalk system that was cleared of snow, and (mostly) ice free, I never had to venture out into traffic. Plus, I found lots of interesting things to look at to keep my mind distracted: neat little shops and restaurants along College Avenue, interesting buildings at Lawrence University, tons of other runners and walkers, nesting eagles along the Fox River, and old mills and factories converted into eclectic shopping & dining centers. I use a GPS tracking program called InstaMapper for my iPhone, so Josh was able to stalk track me to make sure I didn’t get stolen. He grabbed a screen shot of my Saturday route. Note that I made seven bridge crossings with two repeat crossings:

That little cluster of yellow dots around the red dot is me doing loops by the coffee shop in order to complete my distance.  Each time I went by, the people sitting in the window gave me strange looks. I bet they were really surprised when, on my third time by, I came in & sat down at Josh’s table. It was cold, with a 30mph wind that I fought the entire way so I bet I looked really purty when I was done. Oh well, I’ll never see those folks again!

Anyway, today’s run marked the end of my third week of half marathon training and here’s what those weeks looked like:

• Week 1: 9.68 miles @ 10:45
• Week 2: 11.55 miles @ 10:23
• Week 3: 12.54 miles @ 10:36

I’m following a random training plan I found on the intarwebs that looked reasonable given my injury situation. The only problem I have with this plan is that I’m struggling trying to figure out the difference between “easy, conversational pace” and “very easy, comfortable pace”.  I run alone so conversational pace, basically the pace at which I could yak to another person without struggling for breath, is tough to define. I’ve tried mumbling a few words to myself while I’m running just to see what it felt like, but that’s only when I was certain nobody else was around. And, I’m too embarrassed to carry out a complete conversation with myself so that’s out of the question. So I’ve sort of decided that I’ll try to run my mid-week runs in the 9:30-10:30 range, my Saturday run in the 10:00-11:00 range and the Sunday run in the 11:00-12:00 range. It seems to be working okay so far, even though I can only hit my mid-week range about half of the time.

Next week is 16 miles. That’s a big jump for my injury-prone legs so I really need to make sure to keep up with my my post-run maintenance if I don’t want to end up on the injured list.