Men's Olympic Marathon

on Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 10:45 PM

Wow what a race. They went through the half at 2:05 pace. That's crazy considering the heat and humidity. I can't believe how fast they go. I was watched the live feed from the stadium and watched every runner finish. Last place guy who actually finished was from Japan and he looked like he was just shuffling along. i timed how long it took him to do the last 200m which was about 45s. That's still faster than I do my intervals at.

Well the marathon inspired me to do a long run today so i tried for 10 miles. I did the same 10.2 mile loop that i''ve done in the past and that i've measure in google earth. I took the garmin 405 again for a spin. I've only had a handful of runs with it so i'm still trying to get a feel of how it works. It measured the course as being 10.11 miles which is a bit short. I think it may have something to do with me stopping the garmin. I liked the autopause feature on the old garmin and it would stop about a second after i stopped running, but i find the autopause feature on the garmin 405 doesn't work so well as it takes a couple of seconds to register and even when i'm stopped, it will sometimes start up again. I've been using the start/stop button to pause, but i notice when i map the route that each time i stop and restart, it skips (doesn't record) about 20 m of the route which probably accounts for the missing distance. Since I had to stop a couple of times because of my HR and traffic lights, the gaps add up. Will have to try again without stopping or maybe trying out the autopause feature again.

I averaged 8:52 pace for the 10.2 miles. HR was higher than it normally would be, but i guess that's expected. HR spiked a couple of times and I had to stop a few times to let it come back down. Speaking of HR, i forgot to mention one thing about the wisdom teeth extraction. When I was getting prepped, they hooked up a HR monitor to my finger and the nurse had a puzzled look on her face and reached for my wrist to take my pulse manually. She asked if it was normal that I had a low HR. I said yes, that it's probably less than 50 cause I run a lot. She then told me that the meter was saying it was 37. wow. i've never had my HR that low.

Still being lazy...

on Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 9:57 AM

Have only been able to do one 5km run this past week which I did today at about 8:10 pace. It was tough. I remember being able to crank out 15 miles at below 8:00 pace back in peak condition. Those were the days... I've been overloaded at work with something that's due next Friday so no time for running, but we got a bit of a breather with a one week extension so i might try and squeeze a few more runs in this week.

Men's olympic marathon is tonight. Don't you dare miss it!

Update

on Monday, August 18, 2008 at 11:25 PM

Well been over a week since i last posted. recovery has been fine. I have these big black holes where my wisdom teeth used to be and it's been hard to eat for fear of dislodging the black scabs. Ran on Saturday for 6 miles, tried to go very slow considering it was my first run in 2 weeks and a week after the oral surgery extraction but still had to walk for bits. Ran today for about 4.5 miles at 8:45 pace. Just watched Simon Whitfield win a silver medal in the olympic triathalon. He seemed to be out of it with about a km to go but dugg deep and sprinted to the end and took the lead with about 200m to go, but you got to give it to the German for hanging tough and out sprinting him. Man thought Simon was going to win the gold. Would have been nice since he's my age and it's nice to know that us older guys still have it in us.

Survived.

on Saturday, August 9, 2008 at 11:06 AM

I survived the wisdom teeth extraction. I had a generally positive experience (so far). Got some laughing gas and then was injected with general anesthesia. I don't remember a thing. The next thing I remember was waking up in another room and the nurse changing the gauze in my mouth.

I don't remember even giving them my credit card or signing to pay for the procedure. My dad had driven me to the office and on the way home, I was searching through my wallet for my drug plan card so I could get the prescription for pain killers filled, but it wasn't there. I'm sure it should have been there cause I had checked the night before. I told may dad that I would have to go home to get my drug card before I could get the presription filled, but he then told me that I had already given it to him while at the office. I don't have any recollection of that either. Weird.

So bleeding has almost stopped and there isn't any swelling and other than the one Tylenol 3 I took abut an hour after the procedure which they told me to do, I haven't needed to take another one (knock on wood). I'm suprisingly not hungry considering that the only thing I've had to eat in the past 24 hours was a small jar of baby food this morning.

If recovery continues to go this well, I may be able to start running again next weekend. They say the worse is 2-3 days after the procedure so I'll have a better idea on Monday.

Wisdom Teeth

on Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 10:10 PM

Well tomorrow's the big day. I'm getting my wisdom teeth extracted. I haven't done any running at all this week and i suppose it's for the best. I've been trying to put on some weight since I'll probably be on an all liquid/all painkiller diet for the next couple of days. I'm pretty skinny to begin with so I can't afford to lose too much weight.

Dental procedures don't generally phase me. I've had root canals, fillings, even had some work done on my jaw bone a while back and none of it really worried me. I think it dates back to getting my first root canal when i was 14 or so. Someone had told me it would be the worse pain in the world, even worse they child birth and it ended up being that the procedure didn't hurt at all. I wasn't really worried about the extractions until early this week when people started asking me about it and telling me about complications that people they knew had endured. I did some googling and that's the worse thing to do as you only get search results of people that had horrible experiences. If you're looking for something humurous, go onto youtube and do some searches for "wisdom teeth aftermath" and see some funny videos of people doped up.

I've pretty much accepted that i won't be able to run for another two weeks after the procedure so thoughts of doing any racing this fall are now on the back burner. I'll just be happy to try and get back into an acceptable running shape before the winter sets in and hopefully I'll have recovered.

Look at the pretty maps...

on Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 7:39 PM

Did 18 mile long run this morning with one mile at marathon pace effort. According to my brand spanking new garmin, it says I did 18.19 miles at 8:25 pace. You can see the route and data here. I mapped it out on google earth and it says i did 18.29 miles. Interesting. My older garmin would always over predict, but this 405 is underpredicting. I'll have to try a few more runs with it to see if this is going to be common or not.

I only originally intended to do 16 miles, but extended it a bit. I probably won't do a long run next week since I'm getting the wisdom teeth extracted on Friday so i wanted to put in a long run to see how the endurance is. I had thought about 10 miles in of maybe trying to push this to 20 miles, but since i haven't done any long runs more than 15 miles for quite some time, i figured it would be better to stop at 18.

I've kinda been in no mans land in terms of marathon training. I haven't been doing enough on my long runs to properly train for a marathon, but i'm doing enough that if I wanted to i could easily ramp up. I've been thinking about when the "point of no return is" for marathon training. What is the minimum amount of time that would be necessary to prepare for a marathon and run well? Pftiz has a 12 week schedule so i guess that's a start. I'm starting to enter the point of no return for several marathons. the Toronto waterfront is 8 weeks out, Chicago is 10 weeks out and the other Toronto one is 11 weeks out and the Hamiton one (which is nearby to Toronto) is 13 weeks out.

I'm thinking that considering my recent history that i could probably get by this time around with 7 weeks or so, that is, one month of solid training and a three week taper.

Buying stuff...

on Saturday, August 2, 2008 at 10:29 PM

One little wrinkle with the "merger" at work has been that we are getting a new dress code. It's always been casual and on most days I would be wearing jeans and a t-shirt. That's changing as starting next week, we are now supposed to be doing "business casual". i had to go out and expand my business wardrobe today so that people wouldn't realize how limited my business attire really is. I've been putting this off for weeks cause I hate shopping for clothes.

I still think I need to buy some more clothes tomorrow. Since I'm in a spending mood these days, I decided to plunk down some more money and buy a Forerunner 405 today. It's different. It has a touch sensitive bezel and it's a bit awkward to use. I much prefer the feedback that a button push gives. Will try it out on my long run tomorrow. I think I'm going to do it on the waterfront so that I can observe the huge piles of garbage that will have been left from the Caribana parade today.

Oh yeah, I did about 7 miles GA on Friday and a 6 mile recovery run today.

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