Updates

I've been pretty busy with work and getting ready for the irth fo our daughter in less than 6 weeks and haven't been getting around to updating my blog. My training has been going fairly well. Last week I ran a 2 mile time trial with the Kenyan Way on Wednesday evening and it was pretty brutal. I had run 8.25 miles at lunch on Tuesday, the day before, at a low 7:00+ pace so I wasn't as fresh as I could have been, but I didn't want to sacrifice mileage since this wasn't a race. The heat index was 101 when I left the house and the course consisted of about 2.75 loops of a course at Spotts park with a pretty good hill in it which I had to go up three times. I ran it in 11:35 which wasn't all that impressive, but I really don't have a baseline to compare it to. My first mile (which only had the hill once) was 5:41 and my second mile was 5:54 (with 2 hills). Sean had said it was a slow course based on the morning group's times. It was a good hard effort and I need to start working some speedwork back into my schedule. The best news was my hamstring and achilles felt good and weren't sore afterwards and I didn't feel them at all during the workout.

On Monday I did a little speedwork during my run by doing 6 x 1/2 mile at ~6:00 pace and then running at normal pace for 1/2 mile recovery. I was pretty consistent and hit all the 1/2 mile hard in 2:58 - 3:03 and my recoveries were initially a little quicker than I had anticipated, but I was pretty dead by the end. I did a 1.5 mile warmup and then started the workout. The first couple of recoveries I was running at 7:00 - 7:05 pace and then I dropped to about 7:15 pace by the 3rd one and after the 6th one I was toast and ran about 8:00 pace for my 1.5 mile cool down. The heat index was in the upper 90's but at least I had some good cloud cover.

Most of my easy runs I haven't been wearing a watch lately which is kind of nice because I'm not worried about my pace and I can just run comfortably and the runs are a little more enjoyable.

I found out earlier this week that I got my guaranteed entry to the Houston Marathon through Harra so that is nice I don't have to worry about being left out because of the lottery. I'm a little disappointed that the marathon didn't reserve more spots for people. My dad won his age group in the 1/2 marathon last year, but he might not be able to run this year if the lottery works against him which is a pretty raw deal.