Running Chick

Praise the running deities, I made it through my 28-mile week unscathed.  Sorry for the blurry photo, it’s hard to get a clear shot when you’re running SO FAST. Ha.  In case you’re wondering, I’m wearing my new Brooks Glycerine 9s.  They’re pretty sweet.

So, how does it feel to run that many miles? Tiring. That’s a lot of miles for me. Couple that with some issues with aching/cramping legs and stress at work and it equates to an unpleasant week. I was very happy for it to be over.

Monday, I ran seven miserable miles which was supposed to be six but I screwed up my route (oops). My legs complained the entire way and I had to walk and or stop frequently to stretch. The entire run was a mental and physical struggle. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Tuesday, I ran five with Josh. Those miles were a little bit better, but only slightly.  Wednesday, was a day off, so I stretched and rollered and yoga’d the life out of my body and that made my Thursday four much better.  We finished up our week with a hilly and moderately windy twelve.  Oh, and we got rained on.

We’d been trying to outrun these dark clouds but they caught up to us two miles before we ended.  Fortunately, our shower was brief.

Afterwards, we headed to our usual Saturday lunch spot, the Downtowner.  I bet you thought you were just going to see a picture of fries, but I was being healthy so I had a salad and fries.

Unfortunately, I was suffering from eyes bigger than stomach syndrome, so about 2/3 of those fries accompanied me home in a take-away box.

Mr. Creosote would approve of Hardee’s offering.

Weekly recap: Monday, 7 @ 10:28; Tuesday, 5 @ 10:58; Thursday, 4 @ 10:15 and Saturday, 12 @ 11:49.  Next week is a cut-back week and I’ll do fifteen total miles.

Interesting tidbit: I was looking at my mileage summary and noticed that I’ve surpassed my running miles for all of 2011. Yay for not being injured.

Scout says hello.

Weekly recap: Monday, 6 @ 10:46; Tuesday, 5 @ 10:44; Thursday, 4 @ 10:25 and Saturday 8 @ 11:10 for a weekly total of 23 miles @ 10:50.  Next week, I have 28 total miles on the schedule.  That’ll be my highest weekly mileage in the history of the (my) world, so it’s daunting.  However, I have a couple of things working in my favor: 28 is my favorite number and once the week is over, I start to dial back my mileage.  Focus on the positive, I guess.

This deer says hello, too. We had a 20-30 second stare-down when I was finishing up a run on the Nara boardwalk last Monday.  She let me walk about 10 more feet in her direction before she went bounding into the woods.  Earlier, just as I was starting down the boardwalk, I came upon a small red fox.  He didn’t stick around to check me out, like the deer did. He & his floofy tail took off into the bushes as soon as he saw me so no pictures.

Our first major delivery from the local CSA we joined included everything below (onions, cucumber, zucchini, squash, cauliflower, lettuce and turnips) as well as a giant bag of potatoes.  Today I made two loaves of zucchini bread and only used one zucchini.  Good thing I like them in salads.

Fiat 500. How cute! I sort of want one.

I always wear my compression sleeves after a long run.  I don’t know if they actually do anything useful to aid recovery, some people say yes, others no, but I do know that they do make my legs feel better so I’ve made them part of my long run recovery just like stretching, rolling and refueling with fries.  Unfortunately, they’re not the most fashionable thing in my wardrobe and I got two comments on them yesterday.  One was from the gas station lady who told me she liked my “calf wear” and another from some dude at the bar who asked me if I played soccer.  Wonder what they would have said if I’d been wearing my fancier socks?

Josh and I took a bike ride this afternoon and stopped for a short break at the Quincy Mine Hoist. Here’s a glamour shot of our bikes.

And here’s a glamour shot of me on Coal Dock Road just before a massive hill. I’m so glad we were going down instead of up.

Finally, I got up early today to watch the finish of the men’s Olympic marathon.  When I started watching, Meb was way back in 18th position. By the end of the race, he worked his way through the pack to finish fourth. I’m pretty sure that he could have finished bronze, just like Deena Kastor did in Athens in 2004, if he had a a bit more real estate, but it wasn’t so. Still, Meb is awesome.

Source

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.