Same Time, Same Channel

Easy run. Average pace: 9:06/mile.

Weather at 6:45 am: 55°F, 82% humidity, light rain at the start, but then the rain stopped. The weather data I'm getting from motionbased.com says no wind, but I did feel a little wind from time to time, but nothing like last night's huge windy thunderstorm.

My intentions to get up earlier this morning fell flat. I set my alarm for 5:30, but then I hit the snooze alarm for over a half hour, and then I dawdled and did things like change the laundry before getting my lazy butt out the door.

My legs felt pretty good this morning, so I decided to push the pace just a little bit, but still keep it conversational. Splits were 9:44, 9:49, 9:25, 8:42, 8:18, 8:37.

My mp3 player is really a Sansa, but we sometimes call it I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-an-Ipod, or Not-Pod for short. In any case, I have been listening to it on my runs quite a bit recently. I very rarely did that during the winter, but I like it this time of year because my headphones give my ears just a little bit of covering. And I'm enjoying the occasional song that comes along that I can match my cadence to. There were two song like that this morning. The first was "Love Lies Bleeding" by Basia and the second was "Another Postcard" by the Barenaked Ladies. I seem to always get something by the Barenaked Ladies with a good cadence. But this song is longer than the ones off of Snacktime that I've been hearing recently, so that was good.

I just looked out the window and it looks like it's raining again now, harder than before. So I guess I got in from my run just in time.

Easy/moderate run. Average pace: 8:54.

Weather: 46°F, 100% humidity, wind 14N, steady rain.

This run is dedicated to Snoqualmie. The rain would not have deterred her. I got up at about 5:45 and it was raining and blowing pretty hard. I did No More Trouble Zones because I want to do it 2 or 3 times per week and I thought maybe the weather might improve a little bit while I was doing it. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. It was still rainy and windy when I got out for my run. I got soaked to the skin very quickly. I am very cold and wet right now. I've got to go take a hot shower and get warmed up.

Progression Run - 10 miles easy w/ last 10 min. moderate. Average pace: 9:17.

Weather at 6:00 am: 45°F, 84% humidity, wind 9 S. It was a little on the cool side this morning, but at least it was dry.

I've been pushing the pace a little bit the last couple of days, so I tried to keep it easier this time. Except this was a progression run, so I pushed the pace at the end, but kept it easy other wise. Splits were 9:44, 9:26, 9:39, 9:30, 9:45, 9:22, 9:11, 9:05, 9:16 (for 0.75 miles), 8:06 (for 1.25 miles).

Also, I tried to focus on running with flat feet, thus resulting in a mid-foot strike for the whole run. I think running this way also shortened my stride but increased my cadence. None of my music really matched my cadence well except for, surprisingly, the second half of Bulbous Bouffant, by The Vestibules. I don't have a link to a good sample of it. It's a very strange spoken thing. My husband and kids and I performed it once for a Ward talent show.

I've been working on a training plan for the ADT marathon the last few days. I looked at the marathon level 3 training plan from "Run Faster" by Brad Hudson, but it looked a little too agressive. I did marathon level 2 from that book to train for Ogden, so I took the training schedule that I used for Ogden and deleted 6 weeks to knock it down from 20 weeks to 14, since that's all the time I have. I made the first two weeks a little easier since I'm still sort of in marathon recovery from Ogden. Otherwise, I bumped up the mileage a little by adding a 4 mile easy run home from work one or two days most weeks. I put those PM runs on days that I had easier runs, usually just an easy run or an easy run with hill sprints. I figure I'll do the prescribed workout in the morning on the way to work, and then just run home from work at an easy pace.

In keeping with my self-devised marathon recovery plan, I did not run today. I'll run tomorrow and Saturday, which will give me 5 days of running this week. I'll go back up to my regular 6 days of running per week next week. This morning I did No More Trouble Zones since I had time as a result of not running. While I was doing it my 6-year-old daughter asked how come I was doing that instead of running. I tried to explain the marathon recovery plan to her. I don't think she was really interested.

Yesterday's problem with comments on the blog got me thinking about what the blog and the comments mean to me and what it would be like if the blog went away. I realized that it would be much harder for me to be consistent in my running without the blog. I like to think that I would still train hard and consistently without the blog, but the fact is that I'm not sure I would. It's not that I run just so that I can post it on the blog. But being able to post and get comments and talk about your running with other people makes running and training much more fun in my opinion. So thank you to you all. Here's to many more years of running and blogging.

6 miles easy + 4 x 10 sec. hill sprints. Average pace: 9:26.

Weather @ 6:45am: 54°, 90% humidity, wind 5 WSW, overcast. Very nice weather for running. More humid than it usually is here, but at that temperature, not a big deal.

I've got a very busy day today. I'm very busy at work plus I've got to take Thing 3 in for a physical this morning so he can go to scout camp next week and I've got to get DH as well as Things 2 and 3 off to Fathers & Sons campout this afternoon. All kinds of camping that I don't have to participate in. Yippeee!

I worked on the mid-foot strike again this morning. I tried to do that throughout the run and periodically I worked on lifting my knees higher, but I didn't maintain that the whole time. I'm thinking it's time to get some new shoes. Snoqualmie, is it the Brooks ST3s that you call Magic Shoes?

Last Wednesday when I ran I turned off the auto lap feature on my Garmin so that I wouldn't get a split during the 1.25 moderate I did at the end of the run. I forgot to turn it back on, so I don't have mile splits for my 6 miles easy this morning. I didn't look at my watch hardly at all during that part of the run, but I'm pretty sure I started slowly and got faster over the course of the 6 miles. In any case, the average pace for that portion was 9:23. I do have split times for the hill sprints because I use the lap button to time the hill sprints. Average pace on the hill sprints was 6:00, 6:27, 6:30, 5:54. I tried to really push it with the hill sprints and walked back down the hill in between them. I really like hill sprints. They're a hard effort, but they're very short duration and so they don't wear me out too much. I feel like they really help me build leg strength.

Easy run. Average pace: 9:27.

Weather: 65°F, 31% humidity, wind 10 SW.

I ran the Highline Canal Trail with what might be the beginning of a running group. I ran the whole twelve with my friend Chalyce, whom I ran the Georgetown Half Marathon with last summer. We're both running it again this year. We ran the first 8 miles with my friend Michelle and her friend Michelle. They're running the Run the Rockies Half next Saturday. I've run with them a couple of times recently. And on the trail we saw another friend, Carly, running with her neighbor. If we would just get organized, we could have a nice little running group. Chalyce isn't able to run every Saturday, though, because she sometimes teaches classes at 24-Hour Fitness on Saturday morning.

The trail was quite pleasant. It got a little on the warm side, especially towards the end of the run, but it was shady in places now that the trees have leaves.

Michelle #1 wanted to push the pace a little at the end of her 8 miles, so I ran with her at around 8:00 pace for about the last 1/3 of the 8th mile. It was a bit of a struggle for her, but she did great! Splits were 9:27, 9:31, 9:32, 9:31, 9:44, 9:36, 9:38, 9:15, 9:16, 9:14, 9:26, 9:10.

Thus ends week #3 of marathon recovery/week #1 of marathon training.

Easy run. Average pace: 9:13.

Weather: 44°F, 87% humidity, wind 8 S.

I got up at 5:00 am and made breakfast (just Eggo waffles) for Thing 3 and got him out the door to scout camp. Then I did No More Trouble Zones. The abs stuff in it is really killing me. I hope my abs are getting stronger from it. After that I got breakfast for my daughter and then when out for my run. It was about 6:45 by that point. I felt  kind of sluggish when I started the run, and it was a little chilly in the shade. But then I remembered that I was supposed to be working on mid-foot strike, so I focused on that for a little while, and then I remembered that I was also supposed to be working on heel lift/kick back, so I started thinking about that as well. That got me going faster even though I didn't really mean to run faster. I did find that with all my thinking about my feet, that my shoulders were tensing more more than usual, so then I had to keep reminding myself to relax my shoulders. I focused a little on the back swing of my arms and that went well with the heel lift. Shortly after the start of the 4th mile, Mr. Blue Sky by ELO came on my NotPod. I was able to match my cadence to the beat of the song at first, but it got kind of hard to keep it up. I don't know if it's because I started going up hill, or if that was just slightly too fast of a cadence to keep up for very long. It's kind of a long song, especially compared to those little BNL Snacktime songs I've been running to. But I managed to keep up with it for the duration of the song. That is, until the song slowed down at the end, which was a welcome relief. In any case, my splits were 10:03, 9:28, 8:41, 8:38. I didn't mean to run a progression run. It just took me a while to get warmed up.

Fartlek Run - 10 miles w/8 x 25 sec. @ 3K pace. Average pace: 9:01.

Weather: 50°F, 85% humidity, wind 4 WNW, cloudy.

I got up at about 5:15 this morning and cooked breakfast for my husband, who was leaving to spend the next two days at Scout Camp. Then I decided to program my workout into my Garmin. But when I went to do that, the Garmin wouldn't synch with the computer. I had to reset it, which I've had to do a couple of times recently, and which worries me about the health of my Garmin. Then when I got it turned on it gave me a low battery warning, which is crazy because I charge it after every run. So I programmed the workout and then dawdled for a while in order to let it charge. When I was just under 7.5 miles into my run, I got the low battery warning again and I worried that it would poop out on me before I finished my run, but it didn't.

In case anyone is interested in how I programmed this workout into the Garmin, the first step was 2 miles, and then I did 8 repeats of 25 sec. and then go until I hit the lap button. So when I was running, after the first fast bit, which the watch prompted me to start after the first 2 miles, I hit the lap button whenever my total distance showed a full mile (at 3.00, 4.00, etc.) and started running fast. Then the watch would beep and tell me when the 25 seconds was up and I would slow back down.

It turns out I went faster than I was shooting for. I have a bad tendency to do that. But especially on a short interval like 25 sec., the Garmin doesn't have much of a chance to show an accurate pace during the run. I think it gives a relatively accurate average pace after the fact, but not in real time. In any case, the pace for my fast bits today were 6:45, 6:08, 6:28, 6:37, 6:05, 6:26, 6:25, 5:58. I meant to hit around 7:00. Oh well. I guess since I was able to do the last one the fastest of all, I wasn't going faster than I could handle. I'll see how dead I feel tomorrow, I guess.

Easy* run. Average pace 9:00/mile.

Weather: 52°F, 82% humidity, wind 6.5 SSE, overcast. It's been quite humid in the mornings lately, but it doesn't stay like that all day.

This was the run that never seemed to end. I slept in a little and got a late start (6:30) and then I made a potty stop at a Walgreen's around the end of mile 4 and I had to wait for a bunch of traffic lights, some of them for quite a while. The total time I was running was 1:40, but the total time between when I started and when I finished was 1:53.

*Now to explain the asterisk next to Easy above. I did a variation of my to work and back route to increase it from 9 to 11 miles. I changed the end of the run, which extended the uphill that I get on the return trip anyway. This was the eternal uphill on the never-ending run. Just for kicks, I'll show you the elevation profile of this run. The elevation profile is compacted, so it makes things look much steeper than they actually are, but notice the duration of the uphill in the 2nd half. Of course the downhill in the first half was nice and easy. I was feeling pretty good at that point. Mile splits were 9:47, 9:18, 8:58, 8:52, 8:46, 8:36, 8:52, 9:06, 8:53, 9:09, 8:26.

Now since some of you experienced a blast from the past when I mentioned Mr. Blue Sky by ELO the other day, here's something else for you. This is a song that I don't have on my NotPod. But the video is hilarious.

Progress Run - 9 miles with last 15 minutes moderate. Average pace: 8:58.

Weather: 51°F, 87% humidity, wind 5 SE, partly cloudy. The early morning humidity continues.

I felt pretty good when I started this run but got tired midway through. I thought about cutting it short, but didn't. Splits for the easy part were 9:30, 9:13, 9:37, 9:02, 9:11, 9:05, 9:00, then I went for 15 minute and a few seconds at an average pace of 7:59. I was still a little ways from home at that point, so I did an addition .22 miles at 9:04 pace to get home. My right calf is a little tight. I think it's from the midfoot strike I've been working on for the last week.

We got a phone call last night asking us to go on the Pioneer Trek this summer to help with food. Our 14-year-old son will be on the Trek. Three days of walking across Wyoming in a long dress is not exactly on my marathon training plan, but that's okay. I can handle the trek physically, but I could use some spiritual growth. I hope that it will prompt my husband to prepare physically. I need to get him and our son on some kind of walking/runnning program right away so that they'll be able to handle the Trek.

Easy run with 8 x 8 sec. hill sprints. Average pace: 9:34.

Weather: 47°F, 87% humidity, wind 7 ESE, sunny. This is the first morning all week that it has been sunny.

I still have a little tightness in my right calf. I used the stick on it a lot last night. It felt tight during the run, but I wouldn't really call it pain. I tried to focus more on doing the midfoot strike properly with my left foot. I think my left foot has been a little lazy and has been making the right food do more work.

 My Garmin was being stupid last night. I mapped out a 15 mile route for Saturday and I wanted upload it to my Garmin, but I got an error saying it couldn't accept any more routes. So I deleted old routes out of  Training Center and tried to delete old routes off of my Garmin, and whenever I tried to delete a route off of the Garmin, the thing would lock up and I'd have to do a reset and the route wouldn't be deleted. Stupid thing.

In any case, I turned off auto laps yesterday and forgot to turn it back on, so I don't have mile splits for the easy miles today. I do have paces for the hill sprints because I hit the lap button manually for those. They are 7:26, 6:34, 7:20, 5:52, 5:54, 7:03, 6:03, 6:20. I don't know why I was so inconsistent this morning.

Progression run. 15 miles with last 30 minutes moderate, uphill if possible. Yeah, it's possible. Average pace: 9:05.

Weather: 62°F, 65% humidity, wind 20 S. It was very windy and somehow felt like I was running into the wind the whole time. I actually was running either east or west most of the time, so it was a cross wind, and then I had some lovely south straight into the wind at the end. More about that later.

I was late getting out for my run this morning. I had all these good intentions to get up and do it early in the morning. Oh well. I finally got out the door for my run about 8:20. I ran my basic to work and home loop with some variation to make it longer. I went two major roads further before the turn than I normally do, so I was running in an area that I'd never run in before. Part of that section was on a busy highway with no sidewalk and a narrow shoulder, but that was only for a half mile.

I started out with heavy legs and not feeling great, but I decided to keep going and see if I felt better. I got feeling better after a couple of miles and felt decent until about the start of the 11th mile. Around the 3rd or 4th mile a song came on that was a little too fast for me to match my cadence to the beat. The song was in 4/4 time, but I managed to take 3 steps for each measure in the song, so I did 3 against 4 and alternated the foot that was hitting the ground on the downbeat.

When I have a workout like this where the total is a distance and then I'm supposed to do the last part faster for a certain length of time, I have to guess how fast I'll go on the fast part in order to figure out when to start it so that I'll end with the correct total distance. I decided to start the faster part today after 11.5 miles. I was going to start after 11.25 miles, but I decided that I wasn't feel that great and would run a bit slower, so I changed it.

The uphill moderate part was tough, but I probably kept it at a moderate effort for the first 20 minutes or so. Then I hit the hill that I do hill repeats (not hill sprints) on occasionally.  It's probably about a 6-8% grade and it probably took me 3 minutes to get up it. I was struggling by the time I got to the top of the hill, but then things levelled off and there was even a little downhill until the last 2 minutes of my 30 minutes. I was going due south straight into the wind up a hill with about a 4-5% grade. I know I was supposed to be going based on effort, not a specific pace, but I was so close to the end, I just wanted to keep the same pace I had been doing (around 8:30) to the end. I really had to push hard to finish. It was one of those gut-wrenching, vomit inducing efforts (though I did not throw up.) When I finally got to the end of the 30 minutes, I was still about a half mile from home. Usually when I finish a workout and am not back home, I just run easy the rest of the way to make it home. Not today. I stopped my watch and walked home at about 20:00 pace. It was just a really tough run today. I wouldn't have said that if I had stopped after the first 10 miles, but the uphill was a killer. Here are my splits: 9:54, 9:46, 9:18, 8:54, 9:04, 9:03, 9:18, 9:08, 8:56, 9:28, 9:24, 9:33 (this was 0.5 miles), then for the 3.57 miles of "moderate" effort, the average pace was 8:24.

I'm late posting because I had to do a bunch of stuff and got really busy after my run.

Congratulations to everyone who raced today!

Fartlek Run - 10 miles w/8 x 30 sec. @ 5K-3K pace. Average pace. 9:30.

Weather: 51°F, 87% humidity, wind 3 SE, sunny.

I think I ran too hard last week. I'm still tired. I had a hard time getting out of bed and getting out the door this morning. I thought about cutting this run short, but instead I did the full distance but at an easier pace than when I did a very similar workout last week. I did a better job of hitting the correct pace on the intervals this time. I was aiming for around 7:00 pace on the fast intervals. I did 2 miles at 10:08 pace to start and then I did this:

I've got a two/day scheduled for Wednesday this week. I'll run to work and run home. I've done that once or twice before, but now I'm going to start doing it as a more regular thing, once or twice a week. I've got to remember to take an extra change of clothes to work tomorrow.

Easy run. Average pace: 9:23.

Weather: 50° F, 74% humidity, wind 3 ESE, partly cloudy.

I got up earlier today because I need to be on time to work for a change. I was out the door for my run just after 5:30. I ran my normal 10 mile route in reverse. I think it's harder this way. Of course the total elevation gain and loss is the same. However, I think the uphills going this direction are more gradual but longer than the uphills going the same direction. So what is a long distance of a gentle downhill going the other direction becomes a long climb going this direction, while the steeper but shorter uphills of the other direction and brief downhills going this direction. That's why I like the other direction better and do it so much more. I should do the direction I did today more often because it's more of a challenge. Splits were 10:13, 9:49, 9:39, 9:39, 9:01, 8:56, 8:58, 9:14, 9:08, 9:12. I guess those last three miles are hard going either direction because they're normally my first three miles and they're always my slowest miles when they're the first three.

I think I've got everything I need for work tomorrow all ready to go so that I can leave it there today and run to work tomorrow.

AM: Easy run + 10 x 8 sec. hill sprints. 7.01 miles. Average pace: 9:46.

Weather: 57°F, 67% humidity, wind 2 NNE.

Everything worked out fine with the run to work. I added a detour at the beginning of the run to make the distance to work 6 miles instead of 4.5. Hudson says to do hill sprints on the steepest hill you can find, so that's what I did. There's a gully/green belt behind my office with really steep trails running through it. I did the hill sprints on the steepest hill I could find in that green belt. I don't know for sure, but I'm thinking it's got to be at least a 20% grade. When I get home this evening and am able to upload my workout from my Garmin to my computer, I'll see if I can tell what the grade on the hill is. As a result of doing the hill sprints on this hill, which is MUCH steeper than the hill I use at home, my hill sprints were much slower than I do them at home. The pace on the hill sprints was 7:26, 7:57, 8:10, 8:08, 8:44, 8:37, 8;16, 8:21, 7:09, 7:27. After I finished the hill sprints I ran another half mile through the trails to my office. The hill is not that far from my office if you could travel in a straight line, but the trails do switchbacks through the gully.

They have lockers in the dressing rooms here at work, but they've got a sign saying that you can't leave stuff there overnight and it will be confiscated if you do. So I had to leave my clothes and stuff at my desk last night, and then this morning I had to drag myself in my sweaty running clothes with sweaty headlights on my shirt up to the fourth floor to get my stuff, and then back to the first floor to the dressing room. I've got to find out of they really enforce that no overnight locker thing. It would be so much easier if I could leave my stuff there the night before.

It came to my attention yesterday that I should be doing doubles on hard workout days, not on easy workout days because the easy days are supposed to stay easy. I consider hill sprints days to be easy workout days because, while the hill sprints are intense, they are very short. However, I wanted to do hill sprints on a run to work day so that I could use the monster hills here. I've got a progression run that looks a lot like a tempo run tomorrow. It's 2 miles easy, 6 miles moderate, 2 miles easy. I figure if I find that I don't have the legs to do that workout tomorrow after running doubles today, then I'll change my plan and put my doubles on hard workout days so that I have the easy days to recover.

PM: Easy Run. 4.60 miles. Average pace: 9:47.

Weather: 73°F, 50% humidity, wind 11 N.

It's interesting to me how close my average pace is on this mornings run and this evenings run. I felt like I took it pretty easy on the way home and the hills didn't bother me too much. I'll have to see how I feel tomorrow.

I looked in Training Center and it looks like it's got the grade on the hill where I did hill sprints at about 10%. I really think it's more than that. I might take my camera tomorrow and see if I can get a good picture of the hill.

Progression Run. 2 miles easy, 6 miles moderate, 2 miles easy. Average pace: 9:06.

Weather: 57° F, 51% humidity, wind 2-5 ENE.

I didn't feel great this morning. I think I'm going to revise my training plan and put my doubles on hard workout days so that I don't lose my easy days. I'm glad I have an easy day tomorrow. Splits were 10:15, 9:46, 9:10, 8:57, 9:13*, 8:35, 8:32, 8:10, 9:06, 9:12.

* This mile was hard. I was going due south and up hill. While the weather info I got from MotionBased says that the wind was 2-5 mph ENE, that data is from the regional airport, which is quite a ways from here. I swear I was going straight into a strong wind on that mile.

Speaking of MotionBased and weather info, MotionBased seems to be pushing people to switch to GarminConnect. I'm happy to use GarminConnect, except the main thing I get from MotionBased that I can't get anywhere else is the weather info and I don't see any weather info in GarminConnect. Does anyone else use GarminConnect and have any thoughts about it?

I ran through quite a few sprinklers this morning. Some I could not reasonably avoid and others I chose not to avoid. I guess that's a by product of running early in the morning.

 Very easy run. Average pace: 10:11.

Weather (thanks to JD's recommendation of wunderground.com): 55°F, 69% humidity, wind 2 S. With motionbased.com, I was getting weather info from Centennial Airport, which is at least 10 miles from here. With wunderground.com I can get historical weather data (meaning from this morning while I was running) from a weather station that's actually very nearly on my running route!

I took it very easy today because I've had a pretty intense week so far this week and I've got a long run tomorrow. I also had a hard week last week, but I decided to keep it hard this week rather than backing off because I expect to have a very easy week next week of necessity.

In other news, my Garmin and I have reconciled. I sent an email to support about my inability to delete or upload courses. I got a response yesterday and and followed the recommendations in the response, which were to use the webupdater to update the chipset on my device, update Training Center, and perform a hard reset, which deletes all the user data on the device. So now my Garmin is happy and can delete and upload courses and even uploaded to Training Center this morning much more quickly than I'm used to. I guess it just needed a little TLC.

I posted this on the discussion board yesterday, but I know a lot of you don't read the discussion board. It's just something funny.

Finally, here's a picture of the hill behind my office where I ran hill sprints on Wednesday. I don't think I'll be running hill sprints there anymore because I revised my training plan and moved all of the doubles off of hill sprint days and onto harder workout days. So I won't be running to work on hill sprint days anymore. I don't know if it looks like much in the picture, but it's really a tough hill. Also, this hill, and others like it, are on the route of the local 5K that I'm tentatively planning to run on the 4th of July.

Long run. Average pace 9:26.

Weather: 67° F, 62% humidity, wind 10 SSE.

Another Saturday morning slogging it out on the Highline Canal Trail. My original plan was to go north from the rec center (where I parked) 6 miles and then back and then south 2.5 and then back. Sometimes it's mentally easier if I break up a long run like that. But I was afraid I might be tempted to stop after 12 miles if I did that, so then I thought I would go north 7 miles and back, and then south 1.5 miles and back. But then I might stop after 14. So I finally decided just to go north 8.5 miles and then I had no choice but to finish the 17 miles. I won't bore you with my splits. The first two miles were the slowest and then I was pretty consistently between 9:20 and 9:30 after that, but I managed to do the last .13 at the end at 7:31 pace.

I'm ready for an easy week at sea level next week. It might be hard getting very many miles in on the ship. I'll be online today and tomorrow to check on all the racing people and others, but then I'll be completely offline for a whole week.

Red-eye flight. No running.

We left for the Denver airport at about 9:30 pm on Sunday. Our flight left Denver at about 12:30 am on Monday morning. I tried and tried to sleep on the plane, but felt like I didn't sleep at all. Maybe I dozed off a little bit. We arrived in Philadelphia at about 6:00 am Eastern Time and had breakfast at Chick-Fil-A in the airport. We left Philadelphia at 7:45 and arrived in Fort Lauderdale at about 10:30. We collected our luggage and then didn't have to wait too long for a bus to the cruise ship.

Once we got on the ship, we ate lunch, then my husband and sons all napped while I unpacked and took Annie to the swimming pool. I managed to get about a 15 minute nap before we had to do our muster drill. That's where you put on a life jacket and go line up in a designated area where you supposed to go if there's an emergency. After that, it was pretty much time to get ready for dinner. I honestly can't remember what we did after dinner. I think I was in a fog by then.

 I didn't manage any running that day.

AM: The ship was docked at Key West, so my Garmin was somewhat accurate as I ran on the deck of the ship. Still, it was very windy and humid and running on the deck of the ship was difficult. I was wearing a cap and had to really struggle to keep it on when I was going into the wind. I had over slept a bit and didn't have a lot of time, but I managed to get in 3.22 miles. This mileage measure is according to my Garmin. Average pace, according to Garmin, was 9:37.

I guess the ship was drifting a little, so maybe my Garmin figures aren't so accurate. Here's a picture of my running route:

I'm really bad about taking pictures and so I don't really have any. My oldest son took a lot of pictures. I'll try to get some from him and post them later.

I had to get to breakfast on time because after breakfast we were going parasailing. I went up with my 14-year-old and then he got to go again because we had an odd number of people and my 16-year-old needed a partner. Then my husband went up with my 12-year-old. The 6-year-old stayed behind with grandma and grandpa. It was fun and not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. But the boat ride was a little nauseating.

One of the tour operators took a bunch of pictures of us parasailing and sold us a CD with the pictures. So here's a picture of my son and I just before as we were getting ready to go up into the air:

Here's a picture of us up in the air:

We had some free time in the afternoon, so I managed a run on the treadmill. I did 1 mile at 10:00 pace, then 1 mile at 9:31 pace, then 2 miles at 8:57 pace. Even though it is climate controlled inside the ship, I got incredibly sweaty running on the treadmill. I don't know why I sweat so much. Other people didn't seem to be as sweaty. I had to wipe down the whole machine when I was done. Fortunately one of my nephews showed up in the fitness center during my run and I got him to hand me a towel. I had neglected to grab one before I started running.

After that run I had to hurry and get dressed because it was formal night and we were having family pictures taken before dinner.

This was my one and only run on the moving ship. And it was actually my last run of the cruise. I guess I got lazy after this day.

My Garmin was useless while the ship was moving. I wore it so that I could use it to count laps, but that's about all it was good for. The wind was fierce. One direction I was going straight into the wind, the other direction it was at my back, but was blowing my hair out of my pony tail and into my face. I had put on sunscreen, but I was sweating like crazy and the sunscreen and sweat were running into my eyes. At one point, I stopped and went in to get a towel to wipe my eyes.

Just for kicks, here are the map and the pace chart for this run. The map really shows what the ship did, not what I did. The pace chart is kind of funny because it shows where I'm going with the ship and where I'm going against the direction of the ship. I was going into the wind when I was going with the ship and had the wind behind me when going against the ship, but the direction of the ship had a bigger effect on my pace from the view point of the Garmin, than the wind did. Though my true pace was more effected by the wind.

That low point after the 6th peak is where I went inside to get a towel.

We spent this day on the beach in Cozumel, Mexico. It was a lot of fun. It was a very nice beach and they had all paddle boats and canoes you could take out on the water. They had a water trampoline, which we didn't try because it was too crowded. But they also had this think called an ice berg, which was big white inflated thing with handles on one side. It was anchored a ways from shore.You could climb up it and then slide down the other side. My boys had a good time with that, but I didn't try it.

They had a little swimming pool with fresh water and my daughter spent most of her time there.

The kids really enjoyed this excursion. They had never been to a beach before. But despite my best efforts at putting suncreen on everyone, we all got a little sunburned.

We were in Belize this day and went on a really long excursion that started early in the morning and so I didn't have time for running.

You can't bring a ship up next to the shore in Belize, I think because of the Great Barrier Reef that is there, so the ship anchored quite a ways from shore and we had to take smaller boats, called tenders, in to the shore. Then we rode on a not very well air-conditioned bus nearly all the way across Belize to within about a 1/2 mile of the Guatemalan border to some Mayan ruins called Xunantunich. We had to walk up a big hill to get to the ruins and I had to carry my 6-year-old daughter on my sun-burned shoulder. Then we climbed the biggest ruin and that was quite challenging. From the top we could see for miles. It was pretty cool. Getting down off the ruin was physically easier, but scarier, than climbing up had been. Then they took us to a restaurant where we had a traditional Belizian lunch of chicken, and rice and beans. Then it was the 2 hour bus ride back to the coast. We saw a lot of Belize on that bus ride and I have to say that on the whole it was in a considerable state of disrepair.

I forgot to take my camera on this excursion (what an idiot I am), but my son had his. I'll try to get pictures from him later.

When we finally got back to the ship, we got showed and had dinner and then I went to bed early. I was exhausted.

At sea all day, but somehow there was no time for running.

I intended to run this day and I could have if I had really tried, but neither the ship's deck nor the treadmill were very inviting.

I must have been really tried, because even with going to bed early the night before I slept in. It was my daughter's birthday, and so we went to breakfast with her and then took her to the kids' place to get ready to be in a talent show. She wanted to do a little dance in the talent show. Then we had a little free time, but not enough for me to get a run before going to her talent show. We had a little time after lunch, but again, not enough time for a run, because we had a little birthday party for my daughter at 2:00. I possibly could have run after that, but we were in the middle of a big rain storm, and so the track was out of the question. We spent the afternoon participating in various trivia contests they were having on the ship and playing cards with Thom's brother and his wife.

After dinner we went to the show, which featured a magician. He was very good. And then we had to pack because we had to have our bags packed and out in the hall by midnight.

Travel day. No running.

We got off the ship about 9:00 am, and then took a bus to the Fort Lauderdale airport. We hung around there for a few hours and then took a 2:00 flight to Philadelphia. We had a relatively short layover in Philadelphia and then flew back to Denver. Then we had to trudge our tired selves out to long-term parking, and drive home. We got home just before 10:00 pm Denver time. And then of course I had to go buy milk and few other things.

The cruise was lots of fun. I ate way too much and didn't run nearly enough. But it's nice to be home and now I can get back to normal.

Hill Repetitions. 2 miles easy, 6 x 2 min. uphill at 10K effort w/ jog back recoveries, 2 miles easy. Average pace: 10:00.

Weather: 60°F, 59% humidity, wind 2 ESE.

I thought that I would feel well rested and energetic after my four days off, but not so. Instead, I had lead legs, probably from all the junk I ate on the ship and the pounds I put on. I've really got to institute some discipline in my life now.

I started out slowly this morning and did 2.23 miles at 10:34 pace. Then I did the hill repeats. I tried to do them by effort rather than by a specific pace. I looked at my watch for time only, not for pace. As a result, I ran them slower than 10K pace, but maybe it was 10K effort and was what I would do during a bit uphill during a 10K. In any case, my pace on the repeats was 8:43, 8:49, 8:34, 8:32, 8:32, 8:25, 8:15. The last one was definitely harder than the first one, but I pushed it a little harder because it was the last one. The hill repeats did get the cobwebs out of my legs a little bit and I ran the 2.25 mile cooldown slightly faster than the warm up, at 9:53 pace.

I didn't have time yesterday to catch up on very many blogs. I'll try to read some more today, but I do need to go to work.

Moderate run. Average pace: 9:05.

Weather: 67°F, humidity 42%, wind 2 SSW.

My planned work out for today was 10 miles with the last 8 miles hard, but I didn't have the time or the energy for that. I've got a really busy morning and my stomach is not feeling quite right. Also, I think I left my legs on the ship. I thought the time off from running would make me feel rested, but not so.

About 3/4 of a mile into this run another runner and I approached the same corner from different directions and then both turned to go the same way. She was a ways in front of me, so I decided to see if I could catch her by just picking up the pace a bit, but not sprinting. I think she knew I was behind her and she didn't want to be caught because she looked back a couple of times and she also sped up enough that I couldn't catch her. It would have been nice to catch her and talk to her because maybe she was a potential running partner. In any case, she made a turn about 3/4 of a mile later that wasn't on my route so we parted ways at that point.

I tried to run at least a moderate pace today since my scheduled run was supposed to be hard. But I didn't seem to ever be able to get going very fast. I think part of the problem was that I chased this other runner during my first two miles, which are normally my warm up. Splits were 9:21 (this is the avg pace for the first 2 miles because I didn't have auto lap turned on - the rest of these are mile splits), 8:42, 9:07, 8:56, 9:05, 8:44. I hope I get my legs back by Saturday because I'm planning to run a local 5K.