Gone in a Flash

We were all very fortunate to have this Monday off to get in a morning run. It was already hot by 7 a.m. and my friends and I were glad that we were only doing a shorter run before it heats up even more. We ran 4.2 miles at just over 10 min pace, although my friends keep telling me there's something wrong with my GPS because it feels much faster. Ya right!

As we settled down for our post run coffee and C was washing up in the restroom, the rest of us suddenly felt a "flash" of heat in Starbucks and decided it was way too hot to sit inside. The warm temperature inside was made more stifling by the fact that there was a line of people standing right next to our table.  Before you know it, the three of us pick everything up and move outside.  Unfortunately, we forgot to tell C who was still in the bathroom.  I guess when she came out, she didn't quite know what happened to us or where we went.  She did eventually figure out where we went and we were comfortably sipping our coffees outside in no time.

It was a great way to start out this Memorial Day, but let us not forget why we have the day off.

Memorial Day

Tapering Down

I really thought that tapering down our miles to get race ready would feel easy. It really didn't feel easy at all. My friends said it was because of the pace we kept. I don't know, it still felt awfully slow to me. I thought our overall pace would have been under 10 minutes. At least mile 4 was under 10 min/mi and the last mile we ran under 9 min pace. I guess I keep thinking about our previous race times and think how in the world are we going to get even close to it on our upcoming race. It's really hard to guage what our real pace is because we do stop often and that slows the overall pace down too. Oh well, I'm looking forward to an easy week of running.

Round and Round We Go

I went to the SCR interval training again tonight despite the high heat and the winds. It's rather funny seeing the map on Garmin after the fact, but during the workout, all I kept thinking was "when is he going to blow that damn whistle?" The workout started out with the same 12x100 warm up, which I missed by spending too much time in the bathroom. The rest of the workout consisted of 20 intervals of 1 minute fast/good and 1 minute recovery with no stops in between. For me that amounted to about 5 miles of back and forth. I was rather happy about this because it meant no one would be waiting for me and I could continue running at my own pace, which was rather slow. As luck would have it, when the whistle was blown to run hard, I would be running into gale force winds and then the winds would be at my back during the recovery. Why couldn't it be the other way around? Patty and Caryn were supposed to run together on the trails and hopefully they had better luck with the wind.

Almost a Half Marathon

We finished our last long run before our half marathon race on June 3rd. Next week we'll taper down to just 7 miles. Haha, I thought I'd never say "just 7 miles". As we finished, I said to my friends how glad I was done with the run and that we never have to run 13 again, but then I remembered that the race is 13.1 miles. Oh well, at least it will be a lot cooler. The legs actually felt OK, it was just the heat that got to us. Glad it's done though.

Beginner or Intermediate?

I was looking up training schedules for the half marathon ( I know, a little late) to see how we should be tapering off for the upcoming race. It seems all of these training schedules breakdown their recommendations based upon if you are a beginner, intermediate, or advanced. The problem with that is that although my friends and I have been running for quite a while and this is certainly not our first half marathon, our total miles per week and our race pace technically do not qualify us as intermediate status either. So here's the key difference: Total miles 2 weeks before a race for a beginner is 12 miles, 15 miles for an intermediate. I think we'll just try for 13 miles. The weekend prior to the race, the beginner should run 6 miles, the intermediate 8 miles. I think we'll do 7 miles. The week of the race, easy 3-4 miles twice during the week. That sounds like our usual running plan :)

Intervals

Now that I have my evenings free, I went with my husband to run intervals. Intervals are never easy, but it was not as bad as I remember it. Of course it was all that hot either. Maybe our long runs have been helping. According to my husband, there have been more people showing up lately and tonight was actually a quiet night. I'm just glad I wasn't the last one. It was actually nice to see so many ladies out there running, many moms with their kids sitting and playing on the fields. Definitely more female friendly than in the past. Intervals consisted of the following: 12 x 100 alternating with easy, good, hard 2 x 800 with 200 cool down 3 x 600 with 200 cool down 4 x 400 with 200 cool down 3 laps of cool down The good part is that you end up running 5.5 miles without really realizing it.

testing

this is a test!

A Dozen or Two

Squeaking Out 12 Miles

So today was quite an adventure to say the least.  Our run started out with trespassing, climbing over two chain link fences, squeezing through two holes in chain link fences, and running across an old 1895 train bridge just to get in 12 miles.  After all that we almost didn't make it.  We were short less than a half mile and decided to walk up a driveway and back so that we can actually say we did 12 miles. 

Patty brought her iphone so that she can use the Nike + app and also as a GPS, but I thought we should have used it as a camera when we were scaling the fences.  I think it would have been a much better use of the phone capabilities.  I did finally get on the Garmin Connect, but I still cannot figure out how to post the route on this blog.  Patty's brother has to help me figure that out step by step because I spent a good hour trying to get it to post on here and still am not any closer to figuring it out. 

Two things stick out at me on our run today.  One, we are way too old to be climbing fences.  Two, I cannot believe we had only gone 6 miles when we were already coming back from Copperhill.  Oh and one more thing, I cannot believe we completely forgot that we ran up to the baseball fields last week in order to get the extra miles.

By the time we got back, it was hot, Bonnie was dizzy, Patty was nauseous, and every twig on the ground looked like a snake.