Training Update and Race Pics

Tuesday: Did about 4 miles outside. It was pouring rain but I was determined to get out in the morning to do a run while in Boston. My hotel was a block away from Boston Common which is a public park. Google Earth mapped the exterior of the park to be about a mile long so I ended up doing three laps of the park and then a couple of criss-cross paths to check out the interior. Not sure of the exact distance since garmin couldn't get a satellite lock.

Wednesday: Did 5 miles recovery. Not sure of pace, but slow.

So some race pics from Sunday.

Rabbit ears at the start (Bib 169)




Hamming it up for the camera at the finish (ear in hand)




All Finished!

So much for running in Boston...

I'm here in Boston.  Saw the Citgo sign from a distance all lit up on the ride in.  Hope to be running past that at around this time a year from now. The prospects of going out running tomorrow morning don't look good.  Just my luck I guess.  

Pace Bunny Half Marathon Report

Did the Hartwell Challenge half marathon as the 1:45 pace bunny today. The event is named after a local runner who died during a marathon back in 2001. Last weekend, there was a posting in a local web forum about the organisers looking for pace bunnies. Since I was supposed to do 17 miles today anyway, I offered to volunteer to be the 1:45 bunny since that pace of 8min/mile would be at the fast end of my long run pace.

I only realized after that the course was really hilly and it really had me worried about pacing since I wasn't sure if I could maintain 8min/mile up some of the hills. They changed the course this year which meant that the elevation data that you get from Motionbased about past runnings of the race wasn't going to be useful. While doing a little google sleuthing, I found a website made mostly for cyclists that will let you plot a route and then spit out an elevation profile for it. The neat thing I liked about the site is that it will automatically follow the contours of a road for you so you don't have to micromanage the plotting of the route. Anyhow the elevation profile it spit out looked nice in places (ie., downhills) and brutal in others (ie., uphills).

So arrived fairly early and checked in and was given a Brooks running cap with bunny ears on it that read 1:45. I was a bit paranoid about the pacing so I had calibrated my polar food pod on Saturday for 8min/mile pace. The foot pod is almost deadon accurate if you happen to be running at the pace it was calibrated at. I also had a 1:45 pace band and my garmin. While fooling around with the garmin last week, I disovered the avg/pace per current lap display which is a great tool as it lets one adjust their pace on the fly during a race without having to depend on the wonky instantaneous pace feature of the garmin. For example, if one is running 8min/miles and you happen to be 15 s behind pace at a certain point in the race, you can mentally adjust the pace to get back on track by running 7:55 over the next 3 miles. What's cool is that the avg/pace per mile in the garmin gets more accurate the farther into the lap you go, so if the avg/pace says you're doing 7:50 for the current lap, you slow down a bit until it gets back to 7:55. By the time, you reach the next mile marker you should have avergaed 7:55 which then means that you're made up the 5 seconds and now are only 10 seconds off pace. Hope that makes sense.

Anyhow the race starts and as usual I started out too fast. I didn't think I was going too fast becasue everyone was passing me, but I hit the first km at 4:44 (should have been 4:59). I felt that I was breathing a bit too hard. Other than the fast first km, things were pretty good from that point on. I had a couple of people with me at the start, but they immediately dropped back at the first hill. I had decided to try and run even splits for the race since I could use the garmin and polar to judge how fast I was going. I figureed that trying to run even effort would have made me crazy since with the big hills I was never going to know exactly how ahead or behind I was at any given point and whether or not I was going to be able to make up any differences.

Somewhere around the 4 km mark, I lost one of my bunny ears. The bunny ears were made with construction paper and they had been stapled to the hat. A little bit of sweat had gotten into the paper and with the strong wind blowing, well it ended up tearing off. I continued on with just the one ear, making sure to try and hold it in place whenever I sensed the wind blowing. About 3 km later, the other bunny ear ripped off. I went back and picked up the bunny ear and ran the rest of the race with it in my hand. This was a bit awkward since I was also carrying a bottle of gatorade, plus I had to hit the lap button on both the garmin and my Polar watch after each km marker.

By this point, I had really only picked up one other runner who was gunning for 1:45. We started chatting a bit and she was saying that she was more into the tri scene but that she was hoping to better her PR time of 1:47. I wasn't sure that this was the course to try and set a PR, but she seemed to be doing okay. Shortly after the 7km mark, there is a 60m elevation drop over about 3 km. I sent my fellow 1:45 runner on her way down the hill to bank some time since I was trying to run even splits. She ended up staying slightly ahead of me for most of the race until there was only about 5km to go.

There were a lot of rolling hills, up and down, up and down. Trying to run even pace was forcing me to push the HR up, but it wasn't too bad since it meant that I could also recover a bit on the downhills. By the 11km mark, I had banked about 40 s of time. I guess the 5 seconds here and there adds up. I used the garmin avg pace feature to slowly dwindle this down to the point where I was only 11 seconds ahead of pace by the 20k mark. I'm pretty sure the last 1.1km was a bit long cause I ended up finishing at 1:45:07 chip time. Polar measured the last little bit at 1.16km and garmin says it was 1.2km. Anyhow my fellow 1:45 runner was suffering a little bit at the end, but she ended up finsihing a little behind me at 1:45:17 for a new PR! As we shared congratulations after, she commented "Who says you can't PB on this course!"

Well a fun experience. I wanted to try and squeeze in another 4 miles afterwards since I was supposed to do 17 miles for the day. i ended up doing another mile or so but just wasn't motivated to do the rest.

So here's the HR monitor info. Notice the nice constant pace and the HR going up and down with the hills. (No HR spikes, Yah!) The elevation profile is very similar (though not identical) to the one that the bikely website spit out.

Oh yeah, someone actually picked up my other bunny ear during the race and ended up returning it to me afterward. He said he was trying to use it as motivation to catch me.

I'm going to Boston!

Wednesday: Did 11.3 miles. Average was 8:07 pace. My HR spiked part way through the run and kept high for a good portion of the run. Still not sure what's causing it or anything. There doesn't seem to be anything that triggers it and there's nothing that seems to make it suddenly stop.

Thursday: Did approximately 6 miles recovery with strides. Did these quite slow. First 2 miles were at about 10 min/mile pace and then did another 3 or so at 9:30 pace. Then did 6 strides. First three strides went okay but then the HR spiked on the fourth one and it stayed that way for the remaining strides. I did the last little portion of about 300m at a comfortable level to see if it coincided with the 8min/mile pace. It was almost perfect.

Friday: Did 5 miles recovery. Didn't run it with the HR monitor but did time it. It was about 9:40min/mile.

Saturday: Schedule called for a tune-up race. I decided to head to the track to see if I could crank out 5 miles @ 6:35 pace. HR monitor had problems during the warmup. I think I didn't wet the strap enough. Anyhow, I started into it, but 6:35 pace just wasn't doable, so I ended up doing 5miles @ LT pace. I lost track of the count and ended up one lap short so it's actually about 4.72 miles LT pace. Lt was at about 6:54 pace for the 4.72 miles. Then ran around the track for a few more miles to calibrate my food pod for 8min/mile pace. Total for the day was about 8.5 miles.

Sunday: Did half marathon as a pace bunny. Report to follow.

Oh yeah, the title. I know what your thinking, but it's not the marathon. I'm jsut going to Boston, the city tomorrow and coming back Tuesday evening. I'm suppose to do 8 miles with strides on Tuesday. I'm trying to decide if I should bring running gear with me and do it in Boston or whether I should wait until I get home Tuesday night.

Following Boston Runners

Did 9.35 miles this morning which included 6x600m @ 5k pace.

Lap Time	Pace	Max HR
02:20.0	06:15.5	169
02:18.6	06:11.8	172
02:19.0	06:12.8	173
02:18.9	06:12.6	216
02:18.8	06:12.3	212
02:20.7	06:17.4	212

All the paces were a bit fast. I've been aiming for 6:18 pace for these. I didn't run into the HR spiking thing for the first couple which I thought was a good sign, but then on the 4th interval, a high school kid who was running on the track about 50m ahead of me decided that he was going to try and stay ahead of me for the interval. Silly kid. Maybe it's the male testosterone, but I guess the competitive juices got the best of me and I turned it on a bit. I ended up passing him about 300m into the interval (he was heaving pretty bad), but I passed the 400m mark in 1:29 which is a sub 6 min/mile pace. Not good. I ended up slowing down, but the HR had already spiked again and ended up staying up like that for the rest of the session. I did an additional lap and a half practicing my 8min/mile pace and seemed to be able to hit it quite consistently. Then did 3 miles home at just under 8 min/mile pace.

So I, like much of the running community was quite unproductive on Monday while trying to track three browser windows of people running Boston. It seemed to be over so quickly. 4 hours and then it was a bit of a let down since everyone had finished. Just have to look forward to the race reports now.

Hilly Long Run

Saturday: Did 6 miles @ recovery pace. It was warm outside and I was working up a bit of a sweat. Averaged about 9min/mile, but HR was not as low as it's been in the past.

Sunday: Did 21 miles. I did a 10.2 mile route that I've done in the past and averaged 8:22 pace for that. I did this a bit slower than normal because of what I was planning to do for the second half. For the second part, I did a hilly route to prepare me for the pacing duties for next week. I tried to average about 8 min/mile to see how it would feel going up and down the hills. First major hill, I tried to maintain pace up a 6-7% grade hill. Though I was able to do it, my HR was getting up to MP HR which probably won't be to good for people that are pacing with me since that would be almost VO2Max territory for them. Next major hill, I decided to slow down a bit and not let the HR get too high. Last major hill, I ran by HR slowing down to keep the HR just under 160. By this point I had run 18 miles and didn't really feel like pushing beyond that. Average pace for the second half was 10.8 miles @8:04 pace. Total for the day was 21 miles @8:12 pace.

Total for the week was 68.9 miles. Wow, I haven't gotten injured yet (touch wood). Upcoming week is a bit of a recovery week in preparation for a tune-up race on Saturday and my hilly half marathon long run on Sunday. I'm only supposed to do 59 miles. (Crazy Pfitz...) I will probably do a LT run on Saturday since there aren't any races nearby, plus I don't want to go out too hard and burn myself out for the Sunday.

More HR training...

Thursday: Did 15.3 miles outside before work.This is the longest mid-week run I've ever done before work. Wasn't too sure how I would feel for this considering the relatively hard VO2Max workout I had done the previous day. In keeping with the HR training, I was trying to keep the HR just below 160. It was just about perfect weather for running. Started out at about 5C, finishing at 8C with no wind. First couple of miles were at recovery pace. Mile 5 was a split time of 7:45 or so. Thought that it was a garmin blip but then all the other following miles were at the same pace also. Including the first slow miles, I averaged 7:56 for the entire thing was suprised the heck out of me.

Today: Did 9.4 miles. This was supposed to be a general aerobic run but I wanted to do a bit of a LT run. Even though it's gotten a bit warm lately, there's still snow melting in the shopping mall parking lot where I usually do my LT runs and the parts where the snow has melted just has piles of crap that have accumulated over the winter and shovelled into the area. I headed to the track to try for 5 miles at LT pace. 20 laps around the track is not the funnest thing to do, but it didn't seem to bother me that much. I was really interested to see what the pace would be at my LT HR which I'm guessing is just under 180. The first lap was done at about 7:02 pace while trying to get a feel for the effort. I then settled into between 6:50 to 6:59 pace for the remaining laps. I lost track of the count after a while and did an extra one by accident which I was able to do at 6:46 pace. 21 laps in total, average pace of 6:55 over 5.2 miles or so.

I've volunteered to be a 1:45 pace bunny at a local half marathon next weekend. This is an 8 min/mile pace which at the time, I didn't think would require too much effort for the half marathon distance. I only realized about the extreme hilly nature of the course after. The lowest point in the course to the highest is about a 225 feet (68m) climb which takes place over about 1.5 miles. This is about a 2.8% grade. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to maintain that pace climbing that hill. Good thing is that we get to go down that hill afterwards.

Mother Goose

Tuesday: Did 6 miles recovery at slow pace. I didn't keep to my rule of running this at slower than 9min/mile. The last 3 miles were done at 8:40 pace or so. Nice that the HR is still down.

Wednesday: Did a little over 11 miles including 6x1000m @ 5k pace. In the past, I've always done a cumulative total of about 5000m of intervals (ie, 3x1600, 4x1200, 5x1000). Pushing beyond 5k was new for me. The first 5 went okay, but I was losing form on the last one due to fatigue which caused it to be a tad slower.

Lap Time	Pace	HR Max
03:56.6	06:20.8	215
03:55.6	06:19.2	215
03:55.2	06:18.5	183
03:55.9	06:19.6	184
03:56.0	06:19.8	182
03:58.1	06:23.2	182

I seem to still have a problem with my HR spiking. I had this problem last week too. I don't feel out of breath or anything when it happens or feel any discomfort and I'm able to finish the repeat, but I get all nervous about it when I see it happen.

So a Canadian g oose lay some eggs just outside of my office window and she seems to be diligently sitting on them everytime I check on her. Hoping to see some little goslings eventually. She laid the eggs about 1 to 2 weeks ago so I'm thinking that the little ones will be hatching in another 2-3 weeks. Her mate has gotten into protective mode and will try and scare off anything that approaches which doesn't work too well cause she's near the parking lot. He tried to attack my car yesterday as I was leaving. Not sure what he thought he was going to be able to accomplish.

Maxed out MP

Did 19.25 miles today with a little over 14 miles @ marathon pace. I used HR as a guide trying to keep the MP below 170. Averaged 7:31 pace for the marathon portion. This has gotten me into a bit of a rut. The last time I did a MP back in January, I also averaged 7:31 pace while using HR as a guide. My PR for my marathon back in 2006 is 7:31 pace and the marathon I did back in January was done at 7:32 pace. I hope I haven't hit my internal marathon speed limit cause I still need to drop another 15 seconds off.

I still haven't gotten a chance to calibrate my foot pod thingy and it's still off by quite a bit. According to it, I only did 17.8 miles.

So total for the week was a whopping 63.8 miles in 6 days of running. First time I've gotten over 60 miles in a week. This upcoming week is supposed to be 67 miles.

Saving some trees...

Friday: Did a little over 9 miles outside. Weather was not good. Just above freezing, raining and very windy. Averaged about 8:30 pace. No fast finish. I think my fastest mile was probably around 8:20 or so.

Today: Did 6 miles of recovery. I had to really slow down to keep the HR in check. First mile was almost 10 min/mile. I ended up averaging 9:30 min/mile for the whole run. This was more than 30 seconds per mile slower than what I did on Tuesday. I ended up weighing myself after and i was below my running weight which means I was dehydrated. I was thinking of maybe trying a marathon pace run tomorrow as part of my long run, but I think I may be overtraining a bit this week. If I get a 17 mile long run in tomorrow, I will have reached the 60 mile/week mark for the first time ever. If I don't do the marathon pace run, I'll probably try for 19 or 20 miles.

So I think I solved the problem of me killing some trees. I put my Runner's World subscription on vacation hold for two months. I'm not sure if this means that they won't ship the issues at all or if they'll ship all the issues I missed when it starts back up. If it's the former, I'm saving some trees, if it's the latter, well i tried.

Marathon Movie

Wednesday: Did 10 miles which included 4x1200m at 5k race pace. I was hoping to do these at 6:18 pace since this what I did on the treadmill last week. That's translates into about 47s for every 200m. To be honest, I don't think I could maintain this pace for 5k but this is what I did last year during these intervals so I'm doing it again.

Lap Time	Pace
04:44.4	06:21.4
04:49.8	06:28.7
04:42.6	06:19.0
04:44.3	06:21.3

I am usually able to keep track of pacing by keeping track of the split times every 200m. I forgot to turn off the autolap feature on my watch so during the second interval, I had a premature lap reset which caused me to lose track of how fast I was going. I definitely don't like 5k pace. I finished off with 4 miles which included the last 2 miles at sub 8min/mile pace which is pretty good considering the HR was maintained below 160.

Today: Did 13.25 miles. Average 8:23 pace. Got up at 4:45am this morning. The plan originally had me doing 15 miles but I didn't actually get out until 5:30 and ended up cutting the run a bit short. First 6 or 7 miles were done at a slower than 8:30 pace. The HR was actually quite low for this first part, almost all of it at lower than my recovery HR of 150, but my legs just felt heavy and it was hard to push the pace. I managed a couple of 8:15 during the 2nd half, including two sub 8min/miles right at the end though. This 6 days of running a week may finally be catching up to me. This is my third week of 6 days of running. I'm supposed to do a 9 miler tomorrow. I'll see how it goes tomorrow. It's not looking good as it's supposed to rain.

So went to see "Spirit of the Marathon" last night. To be honest, I wasn't as impressed as I thought I'd be. I was expecting this to bowl me over and it didn't. It motivated me enough to get me up before 5am this morning, but I was just expecting more. I don't know what the more is, but just more. It probably didn't help that I started getting motion sickness towards the end and had to close my eyes at times. I did like the line by one of the spouses to the effect that:

Anything more than 5 miles is what cars, cabs and public transit are for. :)

It was nice seeing all the sites of the Chicago marathon again. I was thinking to myself, hey I remember that escalator at the expo, I remember that street and that corner. Kinda makes me want to do Chicago again this year. I guess we shall see...

Beef of the day...

Did 6 miles recovery this morning. Tried out the Nike Free's for the first time outdoors. Run seemed to go fine. Averaged just under 9 min/mile for the whole thing. I had to remind myself throughout the run to slow down. I've decided that I'm going to have to force myself to go slower than 9min/mile on recovery runs. I tried out the long sleeve t-shirt I got at the race on Saturday. It's a bright neon green colour. I generally don't like flashy colours, but it was a free shirt so I couldn't complain. The thing is way too big. It was a New Balance medium mens and I was thoroughly swimming in it. I noticed that my long sleeve New Balance shirt that I got last year from a 15k race I did was also on the big side. Have to remember to request a small the next time i find out that the shirts are from New Balance.

Tomorrow morning has 10 miles including 4x1200m VO2Max sessions. First opportunity since last November to get some interval work in at the local track. Tomorrow also is the day where they are showing "Spirit of the Marathon" in Canada which I will finally get to see.

My beef of the day is with Runner's World. I've been a loyal subscriber for about 6 years now and the magazine seems to get repetitive after a while, but I still subscribe to it on the off chance that there will be an interesting tidbit or story every once in while. Anyhow I got my most recent issue yesterday. I got home today to find the exact same issue in my mailbox. I thought that maybe there was a mixup and they sent it out twice. What had actually happened was that the Scotiabank marathon which i ran last year is giving a three issue trial subscription to all those who ran the marathon last year. Since my race name is different from the name I'm subscribed under, they must have assumed that I'm two different people.

I'm not so mad that i'm going to get three duplicate issues of a magazine I'm already going to receive anyways, though I guess I'm contributing to the killing of some defenseless tress by not doing anything about it. What I'm mad at is that the rate they are offering new subscriptions is way less than I'm currently paying. I renewed a couple of months ago for 1 year at $35. They are offering new subscriptions the incredible rate of $30 for 2 years. That's just not fair. I can understand trying to bring in more customers but that discounted rate really irks me.

Training by HR.

I've been generally been doing my long runs at around 8:30 min/mile which is in a comfortable zone for me. I wanted to bump up the pace a bit. I used to train based on HR which allowed me to reach whatever pace the HR dictated. Last year, I bought into the pace thing where as long as I was running in a certain pace range for an expected marathon time, I was okay. I didn't see the improvement gains I thought I should so I'm back to trying to run by HR. I've been using 160 as the upper range for my long run HR, but I've been using that for the past 4 years. I should probably re-evaulate that. Will have to try and determine my max HR at some point.

So today was 17 miles on the schedule. I decided to run the same route that I ran last week as it would allow me to make some comparisons. Last week, I did 17.2 miles in 2:26:00 for an average pace of 8:29. My legs were still a little sore from the race yesterday, but I had to try. I used my foot pod measuring thing which I haven't used in a while. the calibration is all screwed up in it. The split times are all wacky. Anyhow, I finished the 17.2 miles in 2:18:45, 7 minutes or so faster than last week which averaged out to 8:04 pace. It was getting really tough towards the end though. The HR was below 160 for most of the run. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the HR as it gets warmer since I think the HR is artificially lower when it's relatively cool outside, like it is these days.

Total for the week was 53.9 miles. This upcoming week was supposed to be a 65 mile week which included a 15 mile run on Thursday. I think I'll cut back on the 15 miler. I've been thinking of trying a marathon pace run next Sunday and don't want to burn myself out.

8k Race Report

Ran the Harry's 8k Spring run-off today. Going in I wasn't sure what a good time would be to aim for. On a perfectly flat course, I would think that 33 minutes or so would be doable. However this isn't a flat course. I also haven't really done any real fast intervals lately other than the 600m intervals I did last Tuesday and considering I've done no hill work other than the slight elevation gain that the treadmill gives me, I really wasn't sure what to aim for.

Started the morning with a bagel and peanut butter and downed a bottle of gatorade. Headed for downtown about an hour and half later. Arrived fairly early and ended up parking about 1 mile away walked to the staging area. While walking there, I got my first glimpse of a hill. I wasn't sure of the course and if we ran through this part, but I didn't like the looks of it. I arrived at the staging area and picked up my chip and then bumped into Yumke. Chatted a bit and dropped off my gear and then we both headed to the start line. We took a look at the final uphill climb at the finish line and it was worse than I had feared. It was steep. Having now been thoroughly psyched out, we headed back to the start line to get ready. This year, they introduced a starting corral system which forced people to seed themselves correctly. I had put down 33 minutes when I had signed up and so that allowed me to get into the first corral. Wishful thinking I guess.

The race starts. In hindsight I think I should have warmed up a bit and done some strides because it really felt hard during the first km. There wasn't too much elbow bumping and everyone around me seemed to be going at the right pace though a lot of people were passing me. I pass the first km marker at 4:00 minutes flat. It was actually a few seconds faster since my watch was measuring gun time. It was slightly faster than I would have liked and I tried to slow down for the second km, but there is a huge downhill in the second km. This hill is actually the same hill that we would have to run up right at the end. End up doing the second km in 4:01. Also, my HR went all crazy during these portions.

Km 3 through 5, I didn't get any split times mostly because km 3 has a big uphill on it. I ended up putting my head down and trying to go constant effort up it. By the time, I reached the top and had recovered from the climb, I had missed the 3 and 4 km markers. I hit the 5km marker at 21:04 for a 13:04 split time for the previous 3 km. That's 7:00 pace which is actually pretty good considering the hill. I kinda wish in hindsight I had pushed a little harder during this section though. Km 6 starts with a bit of a downhill and then flattens out. This was done in 4:12. At this point, i was thinking to myself that it's less than 10 minutes to the finish line and that i should step it up a bit for the next little bit. I tried to increase my turnover and run stronger. I was passing a few people but my split time for km 7 was only 4:14 though my HR has risen to 185 whereas it had been at 180-182 for most of the race. Passing the 7km marker I knew it was less than 5 minutes to the finish line, but it now included that last uphill portion. I think I worked at constant effort up the hill, and kinda turned it on right at the end. My HR got up to 189 right as i crossed the finish line. Last km split time of 4:34.

So the tale of the tape is as follows:

KM	Time	Split	Pace (min/mile)
1	03:59.5	03:59.5	06:25.4
2	08:00.4	04:00.9	06:27.7
5	21:04.0	13:03.6	07:00.4
6	25:15.6	04:11.6	06:44.9
7	29:29.5	04:13.9	06:48.6
8	34:03.0	04:33.5	07:20.2

Final time of 34:03 gun time (33:58 chip). Average pace was 6:50 min/mile. I didn't find the 8 km race too hard. I was kinda expecting it to hurt like a 5k would. But I guess the real reason is that I ended up treating this like an LT run averaging an LT pace for the whole thing. I kinda wished I had pushed a little harder in the race. Not including the portion where the HR went all crazy, I averaged a HR of 182 through to km 6. 184 for km 7 and 185 for km 8. In comparison, back in August last year, I averaged 185 for an entire 15km race. In fact my 8 km split time then was faster than today and my average pace then for the entire 15km was 1 second faster than it was today though it's hard to make a comparison with all the hills today since the 15k was a flat course.

So hung around and met up with Yumke and then waited for Jellypepper to finish also. (BTW, i've learned the big secret of where her name comes from.) I'd like to do this race again. The race is sponsored by a local Mens clothing store and some people run it in formal wear. I'd like to try running this in a suit one day. I've got a couple of unfashionable suits (think double breasted) in my closet from years gone by and think it would be cool to run a race in one of them.

Lots of cool stuff. We got a long sleeve technical shirt, a technical cap and a medal. Pretty good amount of stuff. I think this may have been a one time thing though since it's the 30th anniversary of the race.

Strides

Did a little over 6 miles today of recovery including 6 strides. Average pace for the whole run was around 9:20 pace. The strides are starting to feel easier. They've been sort of awkward to do these past few weeks. The co-ordination just didn't seem right. Today I was able to power through them. Hope it's a good sign for the race this weekend.

I was downtown this morning and decided to make a little bit of a detour to pick up my race kit for Saturday's race. While driving to the pick up spot, I noticed a big line-up that had formed on the side walk. Not sure what it was till I saw a sign that said something about free chicken, limit of 10 pounds! Huhh??! That's quite a bit. I only found out by listening to the radio later in the day that a local butcher had won 14 million in a lottery last week and decided to spread the wealth by giving away the chicken. You can read about it and see the sign here.

Quick Update

Tuesday: Did 9 miles at the gym including 6 VO2Max intervals. Did the interrvals at 9.5 mi/hr (6:18 pace) for about 0.4 miles which is about 600m or so. Finished off with 2 miles at 8:00 pace and then 1 mile @7:13 pace. HR seemed to be way down for this. I think the treadmill may have not been calibrated right cause this whole run felt too easy.

Today: Did 11.4 miles outside. Wanted to try and bang out a run with a moderate effort. Started off slow and progressively increased the pace over the first three miles. Then averaged about 8:00 pace for the remaining 8.4 miles. Ran this without the garmin. I think I've been relying too much on it for pace information so I tried to just have in a moderate consistent effort and then mapped out the route after. I ran this first portion by HR trying to get a feel for what the effort will feel like at a HR of 160 and then just tried to maintain that feeling the rest of the way. HR seemed to trail off a bit at the end. Kinda wish I knew what the pace was at that point. I think I may have to go back to using my foot pod thingy which I haven't used in a long while now.