Running Chick

Greetings from Southern Illinois, where it’s raining like a mofo.  I guess it’s better than the 80 mph wind that we had for the first ten hours of the drive. 

I held my camera in my lap for the majority of the trip waiting to snap a picture of something exciting but I got nothing. A few windmills and some other boring things, but that’s about it. As soon as I packed my camera away as dusk was falling, we came around a corner just North of Effingham, IL and discovered a giant semi flipped over in the grassy median of the expressway. Figures!

We pulled into Marion, IL after twelve hours on the road, checked into our hotel and decided to try and find a little bar to have a drink or two. Guess what? Marion, IL stops serving after 9pm on Sundays. Seriously. Bah.

We have another nine hours on the schedule tomorrow before we arrive at our final destination in Vidalia, GA. We go through Nashville and Atlanta, so I’m hoping this leg of the trip will provide me with more picture taking opportunities.

No running this week, but I did do trainer rides of 30 minutes, 40 minutes and 1 hour and 45 minutes.  This time, my long ride was made possible by the royal wedding on DVR (loved the dress), last week’s episode of “Justified” and the first hour or so of the “Hurt Locker”. I was trying to make it to an even two hours, but I just couldn’t.

I had another session with the massage therapist on Wednesday.  He found a bunch of trigger points and knots deep in my calf and down by my ankle that he attempted to work out, while I tried not to cry. Some of them were pretty painful. He also gave me LED light therapy, which is supposed to help speed up the recovery process. Josh thinks it’s a hoax, but I don’t know. I figure if it works, great, and if not, then it’s not like I’m out anything. My leg was pretty sore the next day from all the attention it got, but it did seem to be a lot looser. Two days after the session, I was walking up & down stairs without pain and I’m thinking I’ll probably go for a short run or two this week and see how things turn out.

Sitting in a car doing nothing for 12 hours straight is hard, time to hit the sack!

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.

Josh and I spent a few days last week in Chicago.  I was there for a conference and Josh tagged along for the ride.  If I yap about all the stuff we did in this blog post, it'd be miles long, so I'll just stick to the highlights.

Chicago is awesome.  It was a bit intimidating at first - people! traffic! sirens! crime! - but after wandering around in the midst of all that for the first day or so, I came to the realization that Chicago is a friendly, welcoming city and that my initial apprehensions were really unjust.  I think it helped that our hotel was right downtown, just a few short blocks off of Michigan Avenue (aka tourist central) and that the majority of the people in that area were either the 9-5ers or camera-toting gawkers such as we were.

Our first stop was at Titletown Brewing Company in Green Bay for a tasty lunch and frothy adult beverage.

Next, Milwaukee.  Guess who was driving.

Chicago!  We never made it to the Sears Tower, but I got a picture as we whizzed by on the expressway.

We had some really cool food, like this platter of sushi at a Japanese fusion restaurant.  That’s salmon roe, sea urchin, tuna & salmon.  The next plate over are salmon rolls, which contained scallop, crab, cucumber, radish, lemon, avocado and lemon.

Of course, we had deep dish pizza from Gino’s East of Chicago.

Aside from all the good food and shopping (Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Tiffany’s – you name it, they have it), probably the coolest thing we did was spend five hours at the Museum of Science and Industry.

My favorite exhibit?  Body slices.  Disturbing, yet completely fascinating.  I was so enthralled by this exhibit, that I forgot to take any more pictures after this first one.

We ended our day at the Irish pub across the street from the hotel for a few well-earned beverages.

Finally and sadly, our trip was over. We bid adieu to Chicago with fond memories, a lighter wallet and a plan to go back soon.