Matthew Jordan
| Programming, Running, and ThingsMonday (7 miles easy)
7 miles? What? Oh yeah, mileage increases. My usual downtown route really maxes out at about 6 miles - anything more and you’re kind of just running in circles, which feels weird. So I went up through Maple Hill Cemetary, ran around Blossomwood Elementary, then dumped out in between the medical district and downtown. A couple of extra zigs and zags around Big Spring Park, and back to Five Points. 7 miles in the bag.
Unfortunately, my watch started to die on the last three miles, and I got a bit panicked. I ended up booking it the last few miles to try and finish before the battery died. Stupid. My knees or my metrics? Finished up at 9:36 min/mile, which is a bit too fast. Oh well.
Tuesday (4x1200 meters)
Last day of speed work. YAY!
It was hot and humid. Gross, really. 73 degrees when I started, but it felt like a wet sponge. I didn’t need this. On lap two, I started to feel like :poop:. I’ve had heat exhaustion a couple of times, and I was getting killed out there. No water either, which was probably a little stupid. I realized that if I wanted to finish this thing, I wasn’t going to do it by simply gutting it through.
I took my shirt off, sat down, and rested for a few minutes. Just getting my shirt off made a huge difference, and I cooled off relatively quickly. After a minute or two I felt like I could finish the workout, albeit rocking out my awesome programmer-bod.
Ran the next two iterations without a shirt on, and felt 1000% better. Ended up walking the recovery laps instead of running them at 11:00 min/mile, but being able to finish the last two speed intervals at full blast made me feel good. Or at least, better, since I didn’t want to puke any more.
Shirt back on, run back to house, finish up.
Wednesday
Alas, due to life creeping in (dog had to go to the vet), I didn’t manage to get any crosstraining in.
It’s very hard to get all of the workouts in, 7 days a week. 6 is actually doable - I can usually juggle morning committments such that I can push things to Wednesday or reschedule my runs to move my day off around. But it does mean crosstraining gets sacrified first, which is probably a bad idea.
Thursday (8 mile tempo)
The moment of truth. 1.5 mile warm-up/cool down. Did old marathon route, rocked it out. Even ran further since I hit the stop button on my Garmin at the turn around. What is up with me and my watch? Saw a coworker, that was cool. Lucky to live near routes, since he would have to had to drive to get there. Felt strong the whole way through, which was a confidence boost after the heat knock on Tuesday. Still a bit warm/humid today, but nothing quite look Tuesday.
When does fall arrive?
Friday (5 mile easy)
Downtown. Done.
Saturday (8 mile easy)
Looking at the schedule, I can see that I’m now up to 20 miles of easy running. This feels like an awful lot, but it is apparently working, as I’ve managed to keep up with the substance runs. I did find it hard to keep engaged during that entire 8 mile run at a 9:40 pace, but managed to complete it.
Sunday (10 mile long)
Given the previous week’s 15 miler, I found this run to be pretty easy, and thankfully so. I re-visited the old marathon course again, which is one of my defacto standard out and backs. At the end of the run, I caught sight of an albino squirrel, so that was pretty cool.
Totals
Distance: 49.05 miles
Time: 7:38:44
Calories: 6924
Albino Squirrels: 1