Same Time, Same Channel

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!