wee things

I have no big thoughts to share, so here are some random little ones. A “wee things Wednesday,” if you will.

- Gum has been my #1 winter running homie. I am all over Orbitz Sweet Mint, Strawberry Mint, Citrus Mint, pretty much anything with mint in it that will indulge me in being a mouth breather and give me that “just drank a mojito out of an ice luge” feeling. Unfortunately, I chew gum like a MLB player and swallow it after approximately 25 seconds when the flavor is gone. Running is the only time I can manage not to swallow the gum really fast. I am also mega thirsty after running since it keeps me from wanting to drink anything. This is only really a problem when I want to drink a sports drink which tastes like total butt in the wake of chewing on artificial sweetener for hours – don’t even think about fruit or anything without HFCS. It’s a hard knock life.

- Very stoked to have received my 2011 invite for Brooks ID last week. I have a frightening amount of Brooks clothing and shoes and am never disappointed with their stuff. I am happy to be included in the program again next year.

- The impending move is driving me nuts because I feel like I don’t want to pack my car with half full shampoo bottles, toothpaste, etc because a) they cost about $3, available nationwide and b) I’m coming back, so I will need those things here, too. However, I don’t know about anyone else, but there is nothing I love, love, love more than actually finishing a bottle of shampoo, lotion, hair product, or toothpaste. I usually get super sick of whatever I am using and it requires major drive to not chuck half a bottle of whatever and buy something new. I feel maximal self righteousness when I actually finish a product; I wish shampoo bottles were about half their current size. So, buying new stuff when I haven’t finish the old stuff…bad news. Still working through this one, but I did buy face wash and lotion at the grocery store last night. I am feeling vulnerable, apparently.

- Mild obsession of the moment is shawl collar/button over sweaters, like this one from The North Face or this one from Target. I bought a similar gray one from The North Face a few weeks ago with cute toggle buttons, but am waiting to break it out because at this point my odds of staining it with ketchup while sitting on the couch are HIGH. Scary high.

- I bought a blinking safety light yesterday at Athens Running Company and used it on my run last night. I felt pretty cool running along with a flashing red light attached to me once it got dark on the second half of the run. It was kind of like getting pulled over by the cops for three miles.

weekly recap and hello november

I think someone took a cheese grater to my leg muscles this weekend…I’m not sure, though. This might be the first time the aftermath of a marathon hurt worse than the actual run.

10/24 sunday – Athens Half Marathon – 13.11, 2:02:50
10/25 monday – off
10/26 tuesday – off
10/27 wednesday – 3.62, 33:53 (9:22 avg)
10/28 thursday – 3.0, 27:14 (9:04 avg) + skated 5 miles w/ lisa, 34:20
10/29 friday – off
10/30 saturday – Ridge to Bridge Marathon – 26.22, 4:12:45

total miles run: 45.95
total run time: 7:16:42 (avg pace 9:30)
total cardio: 7:51:02

October miles: 169.94
October time run: 27:15:28 (avg pace: 9:37 – didn’t really pick it back up like I “planned”)
YTD miles: 1646.87 (surpassed last year’s miles with two months to go…woop woop)

joy, elation

These are my feelings about having my last long run before Ridge to Bridge over and in the books. I ran a little over 20 miles this morning (jk, not going to lie because I know it was 20.12 in 3:20) and boy howdy, is it good to know I don’t need to wake up early as hell to run for a couple of weeks. The last two weekends have been a lot cooler and so I’ve had the luxury of waking up between 5:30 and 6am, which are both vastly superior to your alarm going off at 4am only to step outside and it’s already 70 degrees out.

It was pretty uneventful as running for several hours generally is…motorists are scary, why does the guy in the beer truck have to honk at me while I am going uphill, my butt hurts, where am I, what does my bank think about me spending .92 on my debit card several times this morning, etc etc. Around 11 miles, I saw my friend walking near the EPA, where she works. She was walking from her house which is about as “across town” as you can get in Athens (five miles away). You know you might be a weirdo (in a good way) when someone halfway through running 20 miles is like, “You are walking to work from WHERE? The same house I have been to? Are you nuts?” Then I kind of laughed about five miles later when I ran by her house.

finish the drill

I had a sweet 20 mile run this morning with Katie and Denise. I woke up a little after 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so after playing with the puppy for a while (he didn’t mind waking up) and eating breakfast, I was more than on time to meet them on campus at 5am. Since I was early, I trotted across the parking lot to my building to use the bathroom there, armed with my banana-covered pepper spray. Our building is full of too many freaky noises at night.

We headed out a little after five and cruised out College Station to a gas station on Lexington Road where we bought some water at 6.33 miles. The guy running the gas station was like, “walking, huh?” Sir, if you think I sweat this much from walking…I chowed my Shot Bloks and was glad to not have to carry them anymore. We followed the same route back, which is a little more forgiving since you are running more down than up on College Station, and Denise peeled off around mile 11 so she would get back to Dawson Hall at 12 miles. KP was going to run 12 as well, but is either a good friend or just plain nutty because she continued with me for the remaining eight miles. They’re both running a marathon in California in two or three weeks, but I am not sure…I listen, but usually half of what I think about while running blanks out afterward. I know it has something to do with wine (the marathon, not my memory). It’ll be Katie’s second and Denise’s third. We hit my fave Golden Pantry at 12.66 miles for water and the bathroom. I took a Hammer gel here and drank Gatorade.

We continued with a pretty uneventful loop past Bishop Park and returned down Milledge. I felt good today; there were many times I thought I was about to be feeling it pretty hard, but it more or less held off until mile 17 and by that point, there just wasn’t that far to go anyway. The second ten miles was a bit faster than the first. I would say most talking had ceased around 16 miles and it was just time to get it done. I was glad to have Katie as a little rabbit to keep up with. I thought a lot about how hard it is in races to keep going when I am tired and just want a little walk break or whatever which will invariably turn into many slowdown breaks or walk breaks if you let it and it’s better to just keep moving and shut up about it. My two longest runs this time around have been with them, so it is going to be difficult to do another 20 by myself.

Since my thesis defense date was set for the week following Ridge to Bridge, most of my concerns for the race have taken a back seat to how I am going to finish my data analysis and write my thesis and defend in essentially the same time period. I have put the work in to finish the marathon well, even if not as well as I’d like, but I still have a lot to do on my thesis and it’s not as simple as taking a few hours a week to do something I enjoy doing. I think it will mostly come down to my “mental toughness” on race day, anyway. Like I said, the hardest part for me is pushing to do more than I feel like I can do comfortably, especially in the last hour or so on the course. It’s a couple of hours you just have to deal with being uncomfortable and being uncomfortable is okay, so.

To me, finishing a marathon is fine, but it is the culmination of all the hard work you’ve put in over 6+ months to get there that is the real accomplishment. If you didn’t do the work, well, congrats on spending a few hours running on one day, but I’m so impressed with people who put in the time to do it right and I feel like I’ve put a lot of time into this one, even if I don’t end up finishing as fast as I might’ve thought a few months ago. I hope to run Ridge to Bridge as stress-free as possible and then hopefully run Thunder Road again with a little more ambition when the weight is off my back.

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

what goes up

As good as I felt last week, I am feeling like total crapola this week. I slept through my 5:45am alarm for my long run yesterday, so it’s on the agenda again in the morning. I ran 10 yesterday instead and my legs are dying today. The run wasn’t hard. I blame it on finishing right before seminar and plopping down into a chair for hours immediately after I ran and then not getting to eat until 4pm. I hope I can get my act together by the time my alarm goes off tomorrow. It’s a game weekend, so doing my long run Saturday isn’t an option, tailgaters be damned. I only have two classes this semester (one’s 1:15, the other 3 hours), but between those, meetings, sitting at my computer working on SFMNP stuff and thesis stuff, and working at home on transcribing, I have noticed a huge difference in how generally gross my legs feel after a day of just sitting in a chair. It’s good to move when you can.

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

weekly recap

8/15 sunday – off
8/16 monday – 7.0 miles TM .5 mile intervals (9:13/8:27), 62:00 + 1.32 w/ spikey when I got home 12:27 (avg 9:26)
8/17 tuesday – 5.0 miles, 44:49 – PM w/ spikey 2.24, 20:39 (avg 9:14)
8/18 wednesday – off
8/19 thursday – 5.0 miles, 47:44 + weights
8/20 friday – PM 10.25 miles, 1:37:12 (my garmin lost satellite for a minute and a half – aggravating, but rarely happens – so I guessed about .15 longer than what it told me I ran)(avg pace 9:28)
8/21 saturday – PM 7.29 miles, 68:02 (avg 9:20) + weights

total miles run: 38.1
total run time: 5:52:53 (avg pace 9:15)

When I look at this week and compare it to other weeks where I felt like I was successful at meeting my goals, there are a couple of differences. Taking Sunday as a rest day doesn’t work for me because I feel like I’m starting the week behind and it’s so much easier to fit an hour or so in on Sunday evening when we’re generally just hanging around the house anyway. Doing a day or two of split runs also helps and I didn’t do that this week except when I ran with the dog and that doesn’t really count. I need to get up early and get at least a little bit done because usually when I work out in the morning, I have forgotten it even happened by the evening and I am ancy to go run again so I can relax a little bit instead of staring at a computer screen doing one thing or another. The last thing I can see that’s not working for me is when I try do a boring run at the gym. It’s okay if I do speedwork, intervals, or whatever that keeps it interesting (okay, interesting is a stretch), but I kept getting too bored to function this week when it was raining and I ran on the treadmill. Sometimes I like the treadmill, sometimes it drives me nuts – but when I am outside, I feel good and the time flies by.

I am going to make the commitment to do more strength training. My main excuses for not doing it enough are it’s boring, I don’t like going to the gym if I don’t have to (IE, if I’m not running or doing spin class there), and I thought I probably had another reason, but that’s basically it. I want to get my quads in better shape since the beginning of Ridge to Bridge is downhill and I have short hamstrings, which makes downhill even harder on your legs. I also need to get my butt stronger because during every marathon I’ve done, my butt has hurt much sooner than my legs start hurting. I feel like I’m in okay shape, but too flabby. What a gross sounding word. Anyway, I am going to shoot for twice a week.

Today I’m going to make my plan for this week, including when I am going to lift weights (done) and run a little bit tonight (maybe four alone and two with the dogger) and I will be off to a clean start. I also need to pick a long run route for the week (17 miles). I have 44 miles on my schedule which feels pretty doable.

welcome to the jungle

This was the first week of the fall semester at UGA, meaning all 34,000-something students are back in full force and the great things about summer in Athens are over – easy parking, little traffic, navigable lines at grocery stores and Target – while the terrible things remain – heat, humidity, more heat. UGA had the dubious honor of being named the number one party school in the US by the Princeton Review this year. Anyone who’s walked through downtown on a Friday morning (or most mornings, really) and smelled the stench of stale beer and puke probably wouldn’t argue too hard with that. It’s not very surprising given that excessive drinking is more or less institutionalized by tailgating for football games where people begin drinking in public at 6AM and leave the campus destroyed and covered in garbage. Heck, even the athletic director, he of the weekly PSAs against drunk driving, got busted for drunk driving. My personal favorite story of new college student antics this week comes from an article in the local paper, cutely titled Youthful Drinkers Arrested. Excerpt: “An officer saw a 19-year-old in a Georgia football jersey stumble from a bar on College Avenue shortly after midnight, and when she fell to the ground he noticed she wasn’t wearing pants or underwear.”

So, with the return of so many people to town comes more hazards; more people talking/texting on their phones while driving, driving drunk, and perhaps the most common combination, driving drunk while talking/texting. I guess sometimes people, students and non-students alike, are just inconsiderate or lack self awareness, but the texting, etc while driving your car is so ridiculous and beyond inconsiderate. There are also many more pedestrians and cyclists (“cyclists” or “random college kids riding bikes on sidewalks with no helmets on,” which are different things) on the road and sometimes they’re not really familiar with the concept of walking and/or biking, so they transfer their car mentality to walking – “I am a giant 7000 lb SUV and other people should get out of my way so I can get where I am going.” Except they are walking and weigh 130 lbs and the actual giant SUV is not stopping so they can walk into the road talking on their cell phone.

All of this is to say, wow, running just got a lot more hazardous this week. People everywhere and only the minority are paying attention to what they’re doing, walking or driving.

My week was kind of lame and I felt out of it. On Thursday, I decided I was going to scrap the rest of my training for the week and get back on the horse on Monday. It was raining, so I was at the gym. I ran five miles before almost imploding from boredom and decided to lift weights instead, which felt good. I need to mix it up some. On Friday, I was crazy sore. I’m not sure if it was from the weights or not. I mostly worked out my legs, but Thursday morning I had helped with some food commodities distribution at the community council on aging and I moved 112 bags of groceries that were about 30 lbs each from the floor inside to a covered area outside, so it was basically a ton of heavy squats. One other person came in to help partway through, so I am not sure how many I lifted myself, but my arms were dead yesterday. Legs were fine. I went for a run after I finished some work at school yesterday and felt pretty good until the end when I thought my arms might fall off. I ended up doing a little over ten miles, which is a testament to how much easier it is to do something when you don’t feel like you have to do it. It was just a really enjoyable run.

It’s been raining and thunder storming all day here, so maybe the decision to scrap my long run this weekend was moot since I wouldn’t have been able to do it in this weather anyway. I’ve just been sitting inside and catching up on work. I have stuck to my schedule pretty well for the last three (?) months and sometimes you need a break more than you need another long run. I feel a little bad missing it, but I rationalize it by thinking that I still have 10 weeks to go and taking the day off will help me get it together for tougher weeks coming up.

tear it up

It’s been a week of ups and downs across the board (school, sleep, running). It’s a cutback week and my goal mileage is 38.5, leaving me with about ten miles left to do in the morning (2@ E pace, I think 4-6 X 5-6 minutes T pace + 1 min recovery – or something like that, and 2@ E pace). It doesn’t add up, but you know. I should have done it this morning, but I didn’t wake up early enough and ended up running on campus at 10am after I got some things done over there…it was surprisingly not awful, but I was feeling it towards four miles and stopped to get a water about a mile from my office. The guy in front of me was soaked with sweat and buying a 22 ounce bottle of Busch Light. Nice. I only had two dollars, so. Just kidding, two dollars is probably enough for that.

I would feel nice doing a long run in the morning and was thinking about it, but realized that’s dumb going into a peak mileage week – save the unbridled enthusiasm for a few days from now when I need it. It might be an ugly week since I am supposed to have a couple of morning appointments and both are far enough away that I can’t run before them and get there in time.

On Wednesday, I was brilliant and decided to go down by the river at 4:30 in the afternoon. Holy crap. If I take a walk break, it’s rarely more than .05 or possibly .10 of a mile, but I can safely say I walked at least 1/3 to 1/2 of the seven miles my feet moved. My average pace was 11:45/mile. It was hot, humid, the air was generally stagnant as hell, and I thought I was going to throw up almost the entire time. Not sure what I was thinking, but wow, walking sucks. It takes twice as long to get anywhere and you’re way hot from moving so slow. Bummer. Worse than my own personal ineptitude, the water in the creek was still blue from a chemical spill last week that dumped toilet bowl cleaner, among other things, into the water after an industrial fire. It smelled like bathroom cleaner…sad.