Running Chick

A picture of my beloved french fries can only mean one thing – the completion of a long run and the end of the running week. Wooo.

We did our ten this morning and it was so humid that my breathing didn’t feel settled until we hit around 3 miles.  That sucked, especially when the first two miles were uphill.  But, we did it in around 1:55 using a nice, easy pace of 11:30/mile.  I’ve been trying to stick to the McMillian Running Calculator for my weekly running and our long run pace was right where I was supposed to be.  Bummer, though, the battery in my footpod died right as I left the house, so I couldn’t keep an eye on my cadence.  I’m trying to wean myself off of using my mp3 player & the 174bpm audio file that Josh made me, so monitoring my cadence is rather important.  I have no idea how close I came, but my legs aren’t bothering me so that’s good.

On a side note, I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with that darn footpod.  It syncs with my watch just fine in the beginning, but ends up constantly giving me incorrect readings or losing it’s connection during my run, which ultimately skews the data I pull from my watch when I’m done. I’ve replaced the batteries a couple of times, and calibrated it with no improvements.  It is the first generation footpod that Garmin had, so maybe I should just buy the new one. Meh.

Speaking of data, I use a program called Sport Tracks to obsess over analyze the data that I upload from my Garmin 305.  It allows me to look at things like mile splits, pace, heart rate, and cadence (on both the run & bike), along with giving me a neat little gps track of my run, which makes it easy for me to look back and all the routes I’ve taken for a particular distance. I have data going back to 2005, so there’s a lot of stuff in there (which reminds me that I should talk to my system administrator about backups).  Another neat thing it does is allow me to overlay two (or more) runs over the same course and I remembered that we did the same run we did this morning a few months ago when we were training for Journeys, so I compared the two of them based on pace (clink the images to enlarge).

Although we ran the same route, today’s run was ten miles, so one mile longer than back in April.  Here are the run stats:

• April 7th, 2012     –   9 miles @ 11:53/mile, 1:47:32
• August 4th, 2012 – 10 miles @ 11:32/mile, 1:55:32

While we started out slower this morning (red line) than back in April (blue line), our average pace (bold lines) was faster after three miles and we didn’t slow down as the run got longer. Progress! The heart rate graph shows even more improvement.

It feels good to log all the miles, frequently wondering why, and then see validation for our efforts. Yay!

Weekly recap: Monday, 5 @ 10:12; Tuesday, 4.50 @ 11:28; Thursday, 4 @ 10:14 and Saturday, 10 @ 11:32 for a weekly total of 23.50 miles @ 11:01. 

And, for the stupid hot month of July, I sweated through 80 miles @ 10:50.  I handful of those runs were pleasant, but the majority of them were in the heat and humidity and pretty dang miserable.  My totals are a little better than I thought they’d be, which is surprising, but I won’t be signing up for Badwater anytime soon.

So, good riddance July. I’d have liked you better if you were 10 degrees cooler each day. Welcome, August! Please be cooler than your predecessor.