One Week

Oy... it's been another whole week since I wrote anything here. I'm getting bad. And I expect people to start yelling at me (and I expect Lana to yell at me more) if I keep this up. Come on, guys -- this is a team effort.

So, where do we start?

Token Guy

I haven't yet mentioned it, but Lana did -- we signed up for a boot camp thing. Although it starts at 6PM, so it's not really like boot camp. Plus, it's at our gym. And they're personal trainers, not drill instructors. But I'm sure it'll be good. Of course, when I signed up, I signed my name as "Bill -- Token Guy". And when the guy running it called back to let us know we were in, apparently, I was still the only guy in the class. This should be fun.

Oh, and it turns out that I'm likely going to be traveling next week, so I might even miss my first two sessions that I paid dearly for.

*sigh*

King of the "Hills"

Saturday was long-run day -- six miles was on the docket. I decided that if I'm going to do any sort of good run at the Peachtree, I should probably get some hill runs in. There's just one problem with that: I live in Florida. We don't have hills. But we do have the next best thing. So, I got myself up nice and early (6AM) and headed downtown to run the bridges. The route was pretty similar to this one, except that I ran the boardwalk on the Southbank:



Interestingly, though, when I pulled into the YMCA where I park my car for these runs, the Galloway getting started group for the 26.2 with Donna were pulling in, as well. This is the group I was running with last year, before I hurt myself. I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to run with them again, even if I'm training for a marathon that's more than 2 months before the 26.2 with Donna. I could always run more after their training runs are done. Any thoughts?

It was a pretty good run, but there were two things that happened that made it less-than-spectacular. First, it came to my attention that in the middle of long runs, especially when not running as a group, it gets hard. And this was a six miler. I'm training for 20 miles beyond that. The mental part of the run is going to be very difficult... and I think I'm just now really figuring that out.

Second, this was my first experience with the middle-of-the-run-emergency-bathroom-needed-and-I-mean-right-now event. I do feel like I've crossed a milestone in my training, but that was not pleasant while I was out there.

In case you're curious... I found one. And there was much rejoicing.

And then, after that, we went drinking for six hours while I was wearing a kilt and we were playing mini-golf (at the Jaxbars.com Annual Putt-N-Crawl). And it was good.

Monday

I didn't have a clever title for this one, because it was just a normal run. 3.5 miles around the neighborhood. It looks like I've moved up my base run to 3.5 miles instead of 3, so that must be a good thing. It was another great run -- about as fast as last week's. And everything felt good. And I finally figured out why it is that I was preferring to do my standard course backwards -- because it turns out that when I do it the "normal" way, there's an incline near the end for over half a mile! Granted, it's not that much... it is still Florida, but it's definitely noticeable.

Oh, and this run? It was the "normal" way.

Missed Opportunity

We were going to go swimming last night, so we brought all our swimming gear. And then there was lightning as we were leaving work. And we didn't have the rest of our workout gear. So we bagged and went home and watched TV. And it was wonderful.

Which brings us to today...

This morning, I got up at 6:00 to go on my (now standard) 3.5 mile run. Lana actually got up 15 minutes later, but somehow, we ended up leaving the house at the same time. She's just more efficient in the morning, I guess. I'm still stumbling around and this morning, trying to find running gear. Yep... it's time to do some laundry. But my nylon shorts loved me today.

We went off on our warmup walk together, but right when it hit five minutes, we split off, and I went to do my "normal" 3.5 mile run. And the stars aligned... and my run felt awesome from the get-go! Usually, my first half-mile is a little slow, but today's first half-mile split was something like 4:19! I was running my .44 miles in 3:31! Yeah, I know those are odd splits to put into this, but dangit, I was happy. What it ended up being was:

4.0 miles (yep, I extended it half a mile again. It just felt sooooo good!)
36:54 -- including walk breaks!
9:11/mile pace -- again, including walk breaks!

Oh, and my last running part? 8:00/mile average pace. I was hoofing it.

Bring on the Run for the Pies!!!!