-
happy birthday uncle sam
To commemorate our nation’s independence, I ran six miles in ninety-degree weather. Normally, I like to run in the morning or the evening when the sun isn’t so high up in the sky. However, today, being a holiday, resulted in my lazy grad student butt sleeping in past prime morning run hours. Also, again since today is a holiday, I plan on spending my evening in Pullman watching purty fireworks, again during prime evening run hours. Conundrum. So I sucked it up and ran in the afternoon. It was super hot, but a really good run. I tried out a new 6-mile route, this one going back behind the Kibbie Dome on this awesome hill and also incorporating part of my sheep run route. I love those sheep! There’s like four or five little mini-herds of them, each with their little fenced-in area with a feeding trough, shelter, and whatnot. Almost every time I run past them, the last little mini-herd is always eating! I think they’re my favorite.
-
care bear stare
I bought new running shorts yesterday, which I christened today on my traditional Washington-and-back 3 miler. Now I’m officially wearing nothing but high-tech designed-for-running gear. Yay. It was a nice run, although already ridiculously hot for 8 in the morning. Good ol’ July. On a totally unrelated note, with today’s release of the new Transformers movie, I had the perfect idea for next summer’s big budget, CGI-filled, based-on-an-80s-toy-franchise action thriller - Care Bears! I even whipped up some conceptual art for Funshine Bear.
-
tour de src
Today for my cross-training I decided to pay a visit to the exercise bikes at the Student Recreation Center. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve been on one in 7 years. The last time was when I was taking some classes at Ohio State over the summer and, wanting to reread the Lord of the Rings before the movies came out, decided to do the exercise bike thing instead of the running thing because it was a little more conducive to reading. Except now I don’t know if I could read on one of the bikes even if I wanted to - it kept screaming at me when I took my hands off these little sensor thingies that were monitoring my heart rate. Pretty spiffy.
-
two steps forward, one step back
Today marked the end of my first “stepback” week. Basically, every third week, my long run will be significantly shorter than the previous week’s, but the following weeks’ will be the longest yet. So two weeks ago, I did 8 miles, last week I did 9, and this week I did 6. Next week I step up a bit more with 11. Fun fun! It was a beautiful evening - a great time to run!
-
lickety split
So according to my buddy Hal, every other Saturday or so I’m supposed to run at “race pace”. Well, not having ever run a marathon before, I’m not entirely sure what my race pace will be. I’ve been kind of thinking I’d like to shoot for just under 4 hours, since that seems like a nice round, and respectable, time. So that works out to a tad over 9 minutes a mile. So today, I started out my 5 mile run thinking, alright, let’s shoot for that 9 minute mile pace. Well, my internal pace-o-meter must’ve been broken since my first mile was a 7:45! Whoops. I managed to slow it down a bit, finishing the run in 42:30, which is an average 8:30 pace. So still a bit quick!
-
dee dee arrrrrrr
So today, seeing as the university pool is closed for remodeling and I don’t really feel like spending 5 bucks to try and lap swim amidst swarms of kids at the Moscow pool, I did something I’ve always wanted to do - use Dance Dance Revolution for cross-training. After 40 minutes of DDRing, I worked up quite a sweat and my PS2 told me that I’d burned 250ish calories, or the equivalent of running 2.6 miles. Not bad! I’m not sure if I’ll do this every Monday until the pool reopens - I might try using some exercise machine at the university gym or even brave the Moscow pool - but it’s certainly a fun option!
-
fore!
I’m pretty sure today’s run ties for my longest long run ever, at nine miles. That’s the longest I ever made it during my last attempt at training for a marathon. I did start a 12-miler back then, but couldn’t finish, probably because I hadn’t done a good job at getting in all my training runs. I may have done longer back in high school during cross country or track, but I don’t remember. Anyways, it was a nice evening run, which I’ve named the “golf run” because it goes by a golf course. Really creative, huh?
-
baaaa
Wow, that was a great run. I’m really starting to like this rest-on-Fridays thing. It makes me feel so refreshed for my Saturday runs. Today was another 5 mile run. This time, I took a different route than I’ve done before. It’s a modified version of a 7-miler I did a few weeks back. Most of the second mile goes through a big sheep farm belonging to the university, so I call it the “sheep run”. The last couple miles wound around through campus, and I got some pretty good hill work out of it. I felt fantastic!
-
second verse, same as the first
So far this week has been nearly identical to last. 3-miler on Tuesday, 5-miler on Wednesday, and I’ll be doing another 3-miler on Thursday. I’ve mentioned it briefly, but I haven’t really gone into my training program. I’m using Hal Higdon’s training schedule. So far I’ve kept to it on the nose, something that I failed to do the first time I was training for a marathon. When I was training for Cincinnati, I was skipping sessions right and left, basically setting myself up for failure. It was tough, trying to work in retail and train. It’s been so much easier so far. I’m only on campus a few hours a day and have my entire weekends free. Things might get a little crazier once August rolls around and classes start back up, but I’m hoping at that point getting up at 6 to run a bunch of miles will have become as routine as brushing my teeth.
-
one week down, 17 to go
My first official week of marathon training is over, as is my first official long run. Although I’ve done plenty of Sunday long runs this spring leading up to this, this was my longest of 2007: 8 miles. I took a route that headed a good deal north of Moscow, through the beautiful rolling hills and wheatfields of the Palouse. For a while, the wind was pretty strong, and it was blowing the grain so that it looked liked waves on a green ocean. It was also my first run in my new high-tech sweat-wicking running shirt I bought yesterday. Overall, it was a great session. I felt strong all the way through, and even felt like I could’ve gone a few miles more. I don’t know about another 18.2, but I’ve got plenty of time to work up to that!
subscribe via RSS