tour de elvis 5k and week in review

I’m home from NC and not sure how wordy I’m feeling. I got a 14 mile long run in on Friday after sleeping for three or four hours that night, which didn’t feel great, but I tried to stay slow with my easy pace (E pace for long runs is 10:30) and ended up at 10:15. Nothing to write home about, but just about on target. I think I finally realized why I feel like so much of a wuss and scared to pick up the pace this summer. It’s so hot and humid that if I overdo it and start running too hard, it takes an incredibly long time to bring my HR back down and feel normal again, so I’m constantly being really cautious of whether I’m about to go too fast. End result: lot of slow runs, but at least they get done.

We headed to Albemarle that night for the Tour de Elvis 5K. My legs felt decent during the day and not knowing what the course looked like or being at all familiar with the town, I figured I would try to start out around 9:00/mile and see how I felt after that. We started right on time and it was dusky and relatively cool, which was awesome. The first mile had the only hill to speak of and the rest of the course was more or less flat with a big downhill in the last half a mile. My splits were 9:01, 8:42, 8:20, and 6:53 pace for the last tenth. My Garmin gave me a finishing time of 26:38, pretty close to my official time of 26:41. My effort level was medium; I was not trying to run hard, but tried to feel out a quick but comfortable pace and speed up as I went along. I was pretty impressed with the accuracy of the timing and the course distance considering it seemed like I was all over the place (sidewalk, road, crossing wherever) and still ended up hitting the mile markers spot on. It felt good to run a little bit faster without worrying about having to keep it up for long. I was wearing a shirt from MCM which was a decent motivator not to slow too much; didn’t want to be the jackass walking in a 5K and wearing a marathon shirt. Haha. Here is a sweet pic from the beginning of the race where I look roughly the same size as the ten year old kid I am passing…nice flattering photo of my thighs, too.

I’m running sideways because it was about half a mile into the race and people were walking/it was generally dense before we turned off to the right.

After the race, I spotted Richard from Old-Runner.com, owing to his slickly labeled Old Runner singlet, and got a chance to say hello while I waited for my parents to finish up. Richard took home 1st in his age group, which is not surprising if you follow his blog.

We had a little bit of success of our own in this little race and all placed in our age groups. I got a first place for my age group of nine runners, but really was second since the third overall woman was in my AG. My mom was second of three and my dad was one out of…one! We didn’t actually stay long enough for the awards, but Peter at Vac and Dash is super nice and putting them in the mail for us. How nice is that? The tshirts are also really cute and overall, I thought this was just a cool race.

8/8 sunday – 4.03 miles, 37.13 (9:15 avg) + dog run 2.04 miles, 21:09 (10:22 avg)
8/9 monday – AM 3.12 miles, 28:31 (9:09 avg), PM 7.0 miles, 65:30
8/10 tuesday – 7.0, 68:24 (9:46) – I have to defend myself a little bit here and say I was having a decent night run at about 9:10-9:15 pace until I ran into my friend walking her dog and walked a half a mile and talked to her, which dropped my average pace by about 30 seconds/mile…just sayin’.
8/11 wednesday – 7.24 miles, 70:53 (9:48 avg)
8/12 thursday – off
8/13 friday – AM 14.2 miles, 2:25:31 (10:15 avg), PM tour de elvis 5k 3.10 miles, 26:38 (8:38 avg)
8/14 saturday – 7.2 miles, 71:28 (9:56 avg…started out feeling good, ended up pretty rough)

total miles run: 54.93
total time run: 8:55:17
avg pace: 9:44

Overall, a pretty slow week speedwise and I’m a little pained to be .07 short of my goal miles for the week! As Cathy would say, ack! All the runs I did Wednesday through Saturday were serious HILLS and all ended up more or less the same pace for that reason. My knees were super creaky from all the climbing and my abs were probably the sorest part of my body on Friday. I feel pretty good about being able to recover quickly from tough runs, which makes me wonder if I’m not trying hard enough when I’m out there.

don’t let the backdoor hit you

I am up in North Carolina visiting my mom and dad. On Tuesday I was able to finish the last bit of data collection for my thesis, leaving me with a week of freedom before fall semester begins. The last few things I needed to do were like pulling teeth and I am so relieved to no longer wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. I’ve moved onto waking up in the middle of the night thinking about data analysis instead. Really, if I could quit waking up in the middle of the night, that would solve the problem. However, last night I ran into my mom while I was midnight snacking (another favorite past time…stress eating while not fully awake) and she was looking for a snack and said she might take a shower…at 1AM. So, I might be stuck with erratic sleeping habits for life.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to attempt a long run. I’m feeling kind of defeatist about it already. What else is new this summer? Usually I run a few loops around the lake here (about 7.2 miles per loop) and they are hilly and brutal. The roads are tight so no one gives you any breathing room, which adds to the experience. I should run at least two and I ran one yesterday night and was crazy spent. The nice thing about running at night is the longer you run, the better the weather gets as opposed to morning runs where the longer you run, the worse it feels outside. We’re signed up to run a 5k tomorrow night so I am going to play it by ear in the morning. I don’t want to feel completely destroyed at night, but I’m not attempting to break any records at the 5k, either, so I should probably commit to doing a decent job at one or the other. On my way up here, I stopped by the Vac and Dash ,the legendary (to me, anyway) vacuum store/running store/shipping store/screen printer. It was pretty much all I expected it to be, which is to say totally weird and awesome. For once in my life, I didn’t find anything to buy, but it did convince me to sign my parents and myself up for their Tour de Elvis 5k.

My parents are having their kitchen/family room painted so I’ve been relegated to hanging out in the guest bedroom most of today and have been watching TV while I did some work and also completed two of my DI applications, which went in the mail this afternoon and I’ll probably discover that I had a major error in something tomorrow, but whatever. I have one more application to go, but I am so on top of things that the program doesn’t even have their application online yet. Boom. Hurry up, y’all, I have some fire burning over here. Anyway, TV is depressing and I was watching an Oprah about people who’ve lost insane amounts of weight, which made me think about how I want to exercise and then I was like, wait a minute. Crap. I already do. No losing 400 pounds for me, but a few sit ups probably wouldn’t kill me. I should clarify and say that I don’t find people losing massive weight depressing, but it is sad to see people who are clearly so unhappy and alienated and having a very low quality of life. It’s a burden I feel lucky to have not experienced. I hope they’re successful in keeping the weight off.