Trail Running

I did my first trail run this morning. It was a great new experience. OMG are there some hills in those trails and lots of roots! It was fun but hard especially as my first real run in a week. It ended up being a pretty short run since I just wanted to test my foot and see if the softer surface helped it. I'm happy to report that my foot was feeling fine and that I got a great workout in, with some nice views.

View overlooking the marsh.

Another body of water along the trail.

Next time I run this trail, I'll have to get some pictures of the hills! They really got my heartrate up today.

Run stats:
2.79 miles
30:00 min
10:46 min/mile
Average HR: 147bpm
Max HR: 176bpm

a short run and some cross training

since i took the week off from running, i've been doing a decent amount of walking. this helped me judge if my foot was feeling okay and also helped me get some exercise in since i'm not a fan of the gym, especially mine with it's crappy ellipticals and only a recumbent bike which bother my knee. anyway, after a 2 mile walk yesterday, i decided my foot was feeling pretty good and i could try some running today.

so, my parent's chocolate lab, remy, and i headed out to a path behind my parent's house this morning and did some running. there's a nice wide dirt road back there and rarely anyone out there so it was a nice soft surface for me to test my foot out on and it allows remy to run freely and not have to stay right with me on her leash. we did about a mile back there and then i figured we would walk a mile but remy wanted to run so we did some running on the streets and my foot felt fine! i'm so excited. i'm going to do 2-4 miles on a different trail tomorrow and see how it goes. i'm crossing my fingers.

then tonight, i went out to the club to hit golf balls with my dad which is actually a pretty good workout. probably more of a workout for my brain though, since my dad (who teaches golf) kept instructing me and i had to focus but it helped a lot and i'm getting to the point where i'm hitting the balls much better and much more consistently which is fun. i'd like to get to the point where i can play 18 holes with dave since i know he'd enjoy that.

in other news, i got a new (to me) car this weekend! a 2005 toyota corolla with only 47K miles on it. i'm so excited. i have air conditioning again, thankfully. i've been so miserable in my old car this summer.

it was a pretty good weekend and this should be a great week since dave comes home in 2 days!!!

summer's almost over!?!?!?!

i swear if i could think of things to blog about more and if i thought i was a good writer, i'd blog more. but my life is pretty boring and i'm not a very good or interesting writer. oh well.

anyway, i can't believe that labor day is less than 2 weeks away and that summer is about to come to a close. it's been a different type of summer for me. it's probably been my laziest summer ever to be honest. i quit my full time job on june 9th and have been working part time since then. very part time. which has been nice but it will be good when it picks up again soon. i'm enjoying my new job and it doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer all day as my old job did, which is so nice. i need to be more active in my workplace so that i don't get bored.

besides not having a full time job, it's also been a lackluster summer of training. first, it took me way longer than i expected to recover from my marathon. then i struggled to get used to running in the high temps and humidity, as this was my first real summer of training in that type of weather - last summer in new england was cold and dreary most of the time. and i just wasn't motivated for some reason. i didn't have a purpose and i was exhausted all of the time. i still need to get a medical work up too since i'm still having a lot of symptoms that can't be explained but my insurance/new pcp is taking forever to come together, so hopefully i'll get in this fall. and now that i am motivated again, i have a little injury. ughhhh i'm so injury prone. i managed to be a figure skater for 12+ years and only have 2 big injuries but in running i have little things pop up so often. this time it's from wearing my new saucony kinvara's too much too soon. i think (am crossing my fingers) that it's just a ligament strain, i had something similar last fall too. i don't think it's a stress fracture, as there's no bone that hurts to press on or tap. it's on the inside of my foot near the arch, same spot as last year. so i'm taking this week off and icing it a lot. i've also taken this week to refocus my diet and weight loss goals. i have 15 pounds to lose and i will do it by january 1st. i'm dedicating myself to it once and for all. i'm sick of people telling me i look fine and don't need to lose weight. numbers don't lie and i have weight to lose. plus it will make me faster, which is my real goal.

so after this mini training break, i'll be back at it. i have a half marathon october 17th and i'm just hoping to go sub 1:49:00 there now, whereas before i was looking for 1:45-1:47. oh well. then i will switch my focus to the houston marathon in january, where my mom will be running her first half marathon! goooo mom! she's come a long way quick with running.

the other biggest difference in my summer is that my boyfriend has been gone for most of it. he spent july playing in a baseball league in new york, he was able to come home a few weekends that month at least. but after that league ended he got picked up my an independent league on the west coast and has been out there playing since. it's been an adjustment, living alone and being in different time zones but my boyfriend can now say he is a professional baseball player, which is quite the accomplishment and i am so freaking proud of him. i can't wait until he is home next tuesday though!

anyway, that's my summer in a nutshell (there was a lot of fun in there too that i didn't touch on) and i'm hoping for onward and upward from here. i can't wait to have a great marathon training cycle and hopefully going sub 4 in houston!

Two Good Runs

Friday, I ran my first threshold run in forever. And it was hard. I did not hit the target's I set for the two ten minute intervals (HMP and 10K Pace). I ran 2 miles easy for warm up, then I was supposed to do 10 minutes at HMP. I set my Garmin for 8:00-8:20 pace for this part of the run and I ran it at 8:17, which was in the range but slower than I was hoping for. Then I ran 5 minutes easy before the next 10 minute interval of 10K pace (7:30-7:45 set on the Garmin), and I only managed 8:09. Then 2 mile cooldown for 7 miles total. I really need to work on my threshold runs. My plan for this week's threshold run is to run 2x10 minutes at HMP and to embrace the suffering during the run. My new mantra is "pain is good" and of course, "pain is weakness leaving the body". Of course, I mean good pain not injury pain.

So even though I didn't hit the paces, it was a good learning run and I still did push myself. I just need to get used to pushing it so that I can get faster this half marathon cycle.

I also played around with my Garmin before the run and I finally used Garmin Training Center to create a workout and transfer it to my Garmin. It was great to have the Garmin tell me when to run what segment of the run and it also beeped speed up when I was slow and beeped when I hit my target zone. I'll be using it a lot more!

Then I had my first double digit run since my marathon, meaning I hadn't run more than 9 miles in 2 months, eeek! I ran a 10.2 mile progression run with the last 15 minutes between moderate and hard. It felt good, I average 9:17 pace for the whole run which I'm happy with considering how slow I had been running due to the heat recently.

Total miles for the week: 34.3 miles
Total time spent running: 5:27:48
Average pace for the week: 9:33 min/mile
Number of runs: 5 - one easy with hill sprints, one recovery, one easy with fartlek intervals, one threshold and one medium long progression

Best week of training in a long time! Next week should be even better, I hope :)