weekly recap

This week I hit a little bit of a snag with my ankle hurting, but I took off almost three days and felt good on my long run Saturday. Everything else hurt, but not so much ankle pain. This week was different in that I met up with my buddy Katie and her friend (new-to-me friend) Denise at 5am (!!!) on Saturday to run with them. I usually start around 6:30am so it’s still cool, but not pitch black outside since I am alone, so this run was pretty awesome to have about two hours of running in the dark before the sun came up. That and having other people around made the time fly by and it was nice to arrive home around 9am and have the day in front of me. I chose to spend it falling back asleep for 45 minutes, waking up to gnarly cramped up legs from curling up on the couch, and then detangling my hair so I could go see my friend Artee for a hair cut. She took pretty much all of my hair off and straightened it. Here is the picture I took in the car to show Brian:

Then I skated with Lisa for an hour and got all sweaty and ruined it. Typical. I am feeling a little tightness in my calves from yesterday, but ran a few miles tonight and have a light week in front of me running-wise, which is great because I have a ton of things to do for school. I’m running the Locomotive Half Marathon in Kennesaw next Sunday. I had something come up that I need to be in upstate South Carolina that afternoon, so that is going to be a challenge. Maybe it’ll motivate me to run a little faster, you know. I would like to get a long run in midweek, but I am not sure if I will make that happen or not. I turn 28 on Thursday…crazy because I still feel like I am about 12.

9/5 sunday – off
9/6 monday – 6.58 miles, 63:54
9/7 tuesday – AM 5.04, 48:13
9/8 wednesday – off
9/9 thursday – AM 3.10, 27:46
9/10 friday – off
9/11 saturday – AM 19.32, 3:19:18 (avg pace 10:19/mile), PM skated 8.43 miles, 56:46

total miles run: 34:04
total run time: 5:39:11
total cardio time: 6:35:37

three day weekend, buddy

We are sleepily finishing up a busy and excellent three day weekend over here. On Saturday, I got up super early to go skate with my pal Lisa. Unfortunately, it was too early and the park we usually skate at wasn’t even open yet, so we went to another football-and-baseball-field type of park. The pavement was really uneven and gravelly, so it got deemed a failure pretty quickly. I went home and ran a boring few miles alone and grabbed Spikey for my last mile. Mostly I was bored of running alone, although I’d love to claim it was for his sheer joy of running. I stopped and gave him the what-for after about half a mile because he was acting like a nut.

After my guilty running time, I joined Brian in painting our front porch. If I haven’t mentioned this a million times before, our house is very old – it was built in 1907. This provides for an endless array of chores to be done to keep it from toppling over. The paint on our porch was peeling, so we power washed the peeling paint off to prep for re-painting it…about a year ago. Yeah, our house has been looking pretty derelict for a while and I formally apologize to the three people in our town who actually bother to keep their houses looking nice. No, your trailer does not count. We followed painting up with a nap and a shower, then drove to our friends’ house in the north Georgia mountains about two hours away. We brought the puppy with us and he was a huge drama queen in the car. He wasn’t bad, just kind of silly and I think his squishy face/loud breathing lends itself to seeming dramatic. It was super chilly up there, I think it was in the 50s/60s in the evening.

Sunday morning came early with Ollie ready to get out of his crate and party in the mountains. He was playing with our friends’ kids and having the best time running all over the house and conquering the stairs. We went to the mountain Walmart where I fulfilled my dream of buying a pair of sweatpants and then wished I had leggings to put under them too. We took a scary mountain drive over to another friend’s house and then all went tubing down the Toccoa for a few hours. The water was freezing, but the weather ended up being perfect.

We came home Sunday night…it is always good to be home, even if you are only gone for a day. I went to school for a few hours today (five, but who is counting?) to catch up on some schoolwork and work on the program for my data. Boring, but I feel ready to start the week without these things looming overhead. I went for a short run that felt harder than it should have been, maybe because it was the hottest part of the day and I was expecting it to be cool again…finished up with a couple of minutes in the pool. I am beat.

Nothing major of note on the running front this week. Our average temperatures are starting to dip, but I’m not sure if it’s a fake-out or not. It should still be pretty hot out for another month or so, but the mornings are really pleasant. I ran 16 last Friday and felt decent the entire time, other than the first few miles, so that was encouraging. My average pace was still slow, but I’m noting that it’s a little faster than my last 55 mile (or 54.93 mile) week several weeks ago. I am hoping to run about 50 this week with a 20 mile long run. I’m trying not to dread the long run. It seems like waking up and getting the first few miles is the worst part and after that, it’s mostly autopilot, but I get stressed about whether I will get it done or not every week anyway. Nothing to it but to do it.

8/29 sunday – 4.0, 35:31 (8:52 avg)
8/30 monday – 8.12, 78:14 (9:38 avg)
8/31 tuesday – AM 4.45, 43:56 (9:52 avg – no idea why, but this run was SO hard) + biked 15:00
9/1 wednesday – AM 10.05, 1:37:50 (9:44 avg)
9/2 thursday – 7.18, 65:54 (9:11 avg)
9/3 friday – AM 16.05, 2:39:10 (9:55 avg)
9/4 saturday – AM skated less than a mile (10:00?) + 4.03, 38:22 (9:31 avg) + with spikey 1.28, 12:52 (10:01 avg)

total miles run: 55.16
total run time: 8:51:49 (avg 9:38)
total cardio time: 9:24:49

August miles run: 192.57
Total run time: 31:30:36 (avg 9:34)
YTD miles: 1301.48

run softly and carry a big stick

It was a quiet week, kept pretty busy with school/work stuff and managed to overshoot my goal miles by about five. That is what happens when you’re practicing work avoidance, I guess. I felt pretty good after my long run on Monday and was going to take Tuesday off, but I have this class Tuesday night that starts less than fifteen minutes after my afternoon class ends. It’s right at 5pm, so traffic is horrendous and makes taking the bus difficult. There are three of us who are in both classes and we split up, one by bicycle, one by bus, and me by sneakers. I am proud to say that I won the race to class with about five minutes to spare, with bicycle coming in second and bus a distant third. We weren’t actually racing, but it kind of felt like it as I sprinted from south campus through north campus and downtown carrying my notebook. I felt like a huge nerd, but luckily did not see anyone I was too worried about impressing on my short trek. I wasn’t wearing my Garmin since it was not planned (but I do keep extra clothes/shoes in my car to limit excuse-making), so I used Google Maps and good old fashioned wall clocks to estimate my speed/distance.

Everything else has been more or less standard. The weather is improving and I’m feeling good about having stuck it out in the heat all summer. Almost got eaten by a Newfoundland with about 20-30 pounds on me, but what else is new. This week coming up is another peak week (55) so we’ll see how that goes.

sunday 8/22 – PM 4.01 miles, 35:51 (avg 8:57) + 2.09 miles w/ dog 20:23 (avg 9:46)
monday 8/23 – AM 17.01 miles, 2:50:04 (avg 9:59)
tuesday 8/24 – PM 1.2 to class/1.2 back, ~19:00 total (guesstimate)
wednesday 8/25 – 7.12 miles, 1:06:11 (9:18 avg)
thursday 8/26 – AM 3.10 miles, 28:20 (9:09 avg), PM 4.30 miles, 39:15 (9:08 avg)
friday 8/27 – PM 9.12 miles, 1:26:33 (9:30 avg)
saturday 8/28 – no run. skated 10.22 miles at SE clarke, 1:10:38

total miles run: 49.15
total run time: 7:45:37
total cardio time: 8:56:15

I’m a streaker!

Well, I was, anyway, until I fell asleep at eight o’clock last night and didn’t run. I imagine a lot of streaking ends that way, especially that of the alcohol-induced variety. Mine was just plain old running with clothes on, though, for nine days in a row.

6/13 sunday – 4 miles, 36:59
6/14 monday – 7 miles, 63:10
6/15 tuesday – 4.12, 36:00
6/16 wednesday – 7.18, 66:33
6/17 thursday – 3.27, 29:02
6/18 friday – 10.43, 1:40:03
6/19 saturday – skated 7.87 miles, 62:23 – ran 4.01 miles, 34:54

total miles run: 40.01
total run time: 6:06:41 (average pace 9:09)
total cardio time: 7:09:04

sunburns and tequila

Summing my day up this way makes it sound way more exciting than it was, but it was pretty sweet. I woke up this morning and bummed around for a while before picking up my buddy Lisa (aka Interceptor 600HP) and Ashley (Thrashley 6, though I will always remember her old school at 666) and going skating at Sandy Creek Park. Ashley still plays derby, but Lisa and I have been indulging what I suspect is a long drawn out derby withdrawal period by hanging out and skating and talking about how we miss derby and how we are so glad we don’t play anymore. Yeah, both of those.

Sandy Creek has a main loop that’s about .75 mile. We skated a bunch of the main loop and a side road a few times for a little shy of eight miles in a bit over an hour. It’s an uphill on one side and downhill on the other, but we were pretty liberal with the slalom and I’d guess we might have been slower on some of the downhills than the uphills. It was slower than last week, but last week was definitely flatter. I uploaded my Garmin and saw my fastest speed was 3:xx or something (when I switched the activity to skating, it reconfigured to 18 mph) and knew it was on this first section where I started slaloming way too late and thought I was going to eat dirt and lose a few teeth. The bonus of skating is generating your own breeze and being on wheels (duh), but this is more or less made up for by having a helmet on and kneepads/gaskets/etc which make you super hot. Also, Lisa and Ashley are both somewhere in the upper range of five foot something, whereas I am definitively in the lower range at 5’3″ and thus my short legs were busting moves to keep up with their casual gangly strides on uphills.

After apparently becoming sufficiently red, we changed and went to “the beach” aka the lake, which was full of little kids and warm spots, if you catch my drift. It was part awesome and part gross. Lisa and I moved on to the Taco Stand for food and margaritas; I would venture to say there were a few “warm spots” of humanity there as well. The day drinking is too much for me, even though it was one drink. I thought I could power through and get some stuff done at home, but caved to a one hour nap before working for a couple of hours and doing an evening run. I’m ready for a new week! Please let it be a good one.

goody two

I fell off the internet last week. We started our senior testing and I was pretty busy with work, but I am adjusted now. I think I could say a lot of things, but if forced to do so in a paragraph oriented, conversational matter, I won’t. So, I am going with some short thoughts:

- One of the tendons in my left ankle was bothering me pretty well last week. I ran most of the Charity Chase on the far left side of the road and it was a little sloped, which I think is what made my tendon sore. I ran Tuesday and Wednesday under the “well, it only hurts when I walk” logic, then took Thursday off in an effort to ward off lasting pain. I was rewarded with feeling 100 percent back to normal on Friday. Normal as ever, anyway.

- I was going to register for Greenville’s Spinx Run Fest Marathon, but changed my mind when I heard about the Ridge to Bridge Marathon in Morganton, NC. I registered just in time before the race reached the cap of almost 300 runners and I’m pretty stoked about it. It’s held the same day (October 30). One major change is the HUGE downhill for the first half of the course. This initially sounds sweet (and is sweeter than an uphill first half), but I will need to do some major hill running to prepare for a course that’s got so much downhill and no uphill to recover. Not really sure how to deal with training for that. The course looks really pretty and I have been lurking on their message boards where the people seem friendly and odd enough.

- My old phone died a little while ago and I had to get a new one, which was a sad moment. The new phone sends updates from my Google calendar, which was annoying since I hadn’t used Google calendar in about two years. I reset it with a once per week reminder of what training week I’m on (18 to go, 17 to go, etc) because I am always forgetting and doing the wrong thing.

- Working on a mild obsession with Silk Light Chocolate soymilk + frozen banana + vanilla protein powder.

- The other day I ran past a group of middle or high school aged kids and this one boy goes, “I just don’t know how you do it.”

- Heatwave. What’s the perfect time to run when it’s this hot? It’s 9pm and 85F right now, will dip down to a balmy 75F between 4am and 5am, and back to 80F by 7am, maintaining about 84% humidity the entire time. Getting up very early is possible, but I can’t run from home when it’s that dark because a) there’s about 20 feet of sidewalk and b) people are freaks and I don’t want to run in the dark in the country because it scares me. If I go to Athens, I don’t have anywhere to shower afterward unless I go to the gym…and I can go to the gym whenever, so there’s no value to getting up early to go there. I’ve been settling with some daytime gym runs and then shorter evening runs at home, but will probably suck it up and figure something out soon if it stays this hot, which it will.

Here’s what I ran the week before the half marathon.

5/30 sunday – 3.13, 27:18 – it was raining really hard this day and an SUV pulled up to me, not quite stopping but just a very slow roll. The passenger window rolls down and this older woman looks at me and says, “it’s raining.” I was like, “yooooouuuuuuu BISH!” I mean, was she trying to be helpful? I was clearly aware it was raining because I was soaked.
5/31 monday – off
6/1 tuesday – 7 miles, 61:33
6/2 wednesday – 45:00 spin class + 5.0 miles 45:18
6/3 thursday – 7.05 miles, 62:33
6/4 friday – off
6/5 saturday – Charity Chase half marathon – 13.1 miles, 2:09:24

total miles run: 35:28
total time run: 05:26:06 (avg pace 9:14)
total cardio time: 06:11:06

May totals: 162.43 miles run, 24:07:27 time spent running (avg pace 8:54)
YTD miles: 742.21

And then the week after. Pretty boring week; I was both a little tired in general and trying to give my ankle a rest.

6/6 sunday – off
6/7 monday – off
6/8 tuesday – 6.64 miles, 60:00
6/9 wednesday – 6.71 miles, 60:00
6/10 thursday – off
6/11 friday – AM 7.0 miles, 65:20 – PM 3.3 miles, 27:49 (4 yasso 800s)
6/12 saturday – 8.03 miles skating with my buddy Lisa in about 55 minutes, 3.0 miles run afterwards 26:34

total miles run: 26.65
total time run: 3:59:43
total cardio time: 4:54:43

week in review

I am wiped the heck out after five hours on my feet, but the Festival for Life fundraiser for AIDS Athens seemed to be a raging success – lots of happy people, hopefully lots of happy dollars being donated. While driving home, I thought about how tired I was and how I could have run a marathon in the time I was there. It’s always good when you are equating things like that. In most of my races, I spend some amount of time thinking about things that would be worse than running for four hours or so, such as taking a biochemistry exam (this is my go-to mood booster – I could be sitting in a biochem exam, but I’m not), most trips to the mall, staying awake all night, riding in an airplane. It’s been so long since I’ve had a job that required me to stand for hours (probably about five years) that I forgot how much it hurts when you aren’t used to it.

Here’s what I did this past week. I decided to forgo the long run this week in favor of a longer spin class yesterday. That was pretty brutal and felt like a fair trade, even if not serving the same purpose. My run today was pretty awful; I sweated like a beast and my HR felt out of control until I slowed down to 9:30-ish miles. It was one of those runs that is less about fitness and more about a series of intense personal negotiations with yourself to keep moving. In the first mile or so I could feel the blister on my left foot expanding a little with each foot strike. The good news is, I won and kept going instead of quitting after a few miles like I really, really wanted to. Sometimes keeping track of miles is what keeps me from backing out early; I’m like, man, I do not want to write down another 3-4 mile run this week! My feet are even more jacked up, so I performed some minor surgical procedures in my car and picked up some tape to hopefully cover up the blisters for next time.

2/21 sunday – off
2/22 monday – 7 miles, 62:31
2/23 tuesday – 6.5 miles, 58:00 minutes – skated for 30-45 minutes (counted it up as 30 since it was just slow skating and interrupted for “green lightening” a couple of times) – in continuing mechanical failures of transportation news, I saw a train derailed on East Campus during this run.
2/24 wednesday – 3.02 miles, 27:53 – 45:00 spin class
2/25 thursday – 7.0 miles, 63:xx
2/26 friday – 5 miles, 45:35, 58:00 spin class
2/27 saturday – 10.14 miles, 1:35:00

total miles run: 38.66
run time: 5:51:59
total cardio time: 8:04:59

I doubt I’ll run tomorrow, so my mileage total for February is 159.94. A solid improvement over January’s 137.71 and bringing me to 297.65 for the year.

injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

Happy MLK Jr. Day! I hope you were lucky enough to have a three day weekend (not the point of the holiday, I guess, but still a nice ray of sunshine post-winter holidays if you do). I had the morning off from school and spent it sleeping in and being pretty lazy after getting home and eating dinner around one AM last night after the roller zombies filming. It was a long day and a late night for this homebody. Getting back on skates is never as difficult as I think it might be, but it makes my back really sore afterward, mostly in my shoulders. What a weird area to hurt. I have one self-inflicted bruise. All in all, it was a lot of sitting around and not so much skating. I was thinking I was going to be really active for at least a couple of hours, but I think it would be pushing it to say it was more than 30 or so minutes of really scrimmaging/faux scrimmaging. It should be a cute movie. Want to see my zombie make up?

The red stripe was my “bout” makeup and the rest was when I got zombie-fied.

Everyone kept telling me I had a booger and I was like, IT’S LATEX! Sorry that the color is weird in the second one; I auto-adjusted to see what would happen since I took the picture with no flash and I guess it saved it because I couldn’t find the original with more normal color.

Okay, that is enough of the giant close ups of my face. I went to spin class this evening, hoping it might be less crowded if people were off work or out of town (and because my back hurts). No such luck. It took about as much time to land a spot in the class (5 minutes or so in line before they opened the sign up list, 15 until the previous class got out and I could snag a bike I wanted) as the class itself (45 minutes). Before the class started, a girl was asking me about my shirt (from the Atlanta half) and I tried to impart some feeble wisdom on ING Georgia, which she was planning to run as her first full in March (mostly to be ready for those three uphill miles around 17-20 or whatever it is and accept that it will eventually be over and she will finish). Happily, it was a really good class today and I left pretty beat. I ran an even four miles in 37:05 and called it a night so I could come home and study/eat the delicious burrito Brian brought for me; I believe it was his counter-strike to the whole wheat pizza I made for lunch this afternoon (spinach, olive, broccoli, and the dreaded red pepper, to his disappointment). Our fridge is starting to look pretty sad and it’s time for some low budget grocery shopping soon. Brains, anyone?

big weekend

Not much to report from me. I’ve taken to wearing shoes all of the time, from the minute I get out of bed until I get back into bed, and it seems like it’s helping to get rid of my foot pain. The second my foot goes into a pair of Vans to check the mail, though, it’s back. I ran about 33-34 miles last week, averaging slightly shorter runs than usual.

On Saturday, I ran the Marigold 10K. 10K is a weird distance; not a long run, sure, but not short enough to feel very, you know, short. It definitely did not feel short on Saturday. In the interest of full disclosure, I stayed up until about 12:30am the night before and drank two glasses of wine (with ice – hydration!). When I woke up ten minutes before the alarm went off, I actually felt pretty good and made it over to Winterville to register with plenty of time to spare. It was cool, a little breezy, nice. And then as the clock clicked from 7:59am to 8:00am, it was humid, muggy, and hot as heck. That’s a small exaggeration, but I definitely got there early enough to go from reasonable morning weather to typical Georgia weather. I ended up with a time of 56:24, almost three and a half minutes slower than my last 10K which was run on a much hillier course. A couple of things could be to blame. Let’s start with the reasonable:

- Staying up late.
- Drinking alcohol.
- Not running as much as I was a month or two ago.

And move on to the plausible:

- Course was flat. Yes, that is super, but usually when I run outside, I run on some hills. I’m not terribly slow running up hills unless they’re particularly long or daunting (say I from the comfort of my couch and air conditioned house), so I don’t think I lose a lot of speed there. But I do like to charge downhills and it never really bothers my legs, so maybe I am used to picking up some speed on the downhills to make up for an overall slower pace on flats and uphills. I’m using the terms “slow,” “speed,” and “charge” in a relative manner, by the way.
- Water. I drink a freaking ton of water on outdoor runs and should probably have carried some with me since I’m used to drinking regularly. Drinking out of the paper cup doesn’t do it for me and I usually just chuck most of it for fear of chugging and cramping. I think drinking water also gives me another distraction to think about. And distraction is important to me.

There’s probably a “not freaking likely” list of factors to blame, but a couple of days out of the race and I can’t remember them. I went home, worked, tried to nap, and then headed to Atlanta to play some derb in a bout benefiting the Shriners. It was fun and my team won. Technically, I should reverse that order and say that my team won, so it was fun. Not going to lie, I was going to be pretty bummed about losing after feeling like I bombed once already that morning. I was game MVP for my team, as chosen by the opposing team, and that’s always a really nice compliment.

Yesterday, we “kayaked” the Broad River all day. Kayaking is in quotes because it’s more like floating and drinking beer, but the water level was low (26″) so we had to expend a little more effort than usual to avoid getting stuck on rocks, sand, etc. I wore sunscreen and reapplied, but still ended up with a gnarly sunburn on my back, legs, and feet. Brian got it really badly, too, and he used two kinds of sunscreen. Neither too effective, apparently. We spent the rest of the evening laying on the couch trying to recover from that. I haven’t been brave enough yet to try to get into some running clothes without causing major physical harm to myself, but I should probably get on that. Next up, Peachtree Road Race this Saturday. I’m not a big fan of crowds, so this one will be a little nutty.