Sunday, September 19, 2010

Olivia has arrived, back to running some

Our daughter Olivia will be 2 weeks old on Tuesday and she's been a bundle of joy in our lives. She has put a little bit of a crimp in my running lately though. It's tough making it out there for all the workouts when I'm not getting my regular sleep. I'm working on getting back to running every day and I've had a couple of good workouts over the past week. Yesterday I made it out for the Saturday morning Kenyan Way workouts and ran 15.5 miles at a 7:10 average pace. I felt pretty good and finished the run with the last several miles being my fastest. On Wednesday I had a pretty good speed workout too in the evening at Memorial Park. My achilles and hamstring have been doing better too and they have improved enough that I don't need weekly treatments on them anymore. Here's a few pics of Olivia-




Saturday, September 4, 2010

Training still going well, no baby yet

I've had another pretty solid week of training and have felt really good. Our baby hasn't arrived yet although it should be any day now. It looks like maybe she has my procrastination skills.

Monday - day off

Tuesday - 8.5 miles at lunch. It was really hot and humid but I saw one of my co-workers in the locker room about to head out so I ran about 5 miles with him and then added on some more on my own. 8.5 miles in 62 minutes.

Wednesday - Kenyan Way speed workout. 2.75 mile warmup, 1/2/3/3/2/1 workout with 1 minute hard, 1 minute recovery jog, 2 min hard, etc... Ran the workout with Claudio and had a good workout. We were moving at a pretty good clip and I had a strong workout. I covered about 3.5 miles during the workout and then did about a 2.5 mile cooldown.

Thursday - 8.6 miles at lunch. I didn't wear a watch so I don't know what kind of pace I was running, but I ran a 6.9 mile loop and a 1.7 mile loop at a recovery pace. I was a little tired from the Wednesday workout, but I got through it and I'm feeling good from an injury perspective and my achilles and hamstring have been feeling pretty good.

Friday - 8+ miles. I went in for a treatment on my achilles in the morning and Dr. Leist said it was looking a lot better and he didn't need to see me for my achilles for 2 weeks instead of my usual weekly treatment which is a good sign. I'm going to go back in a week to get my hamstring treated since they really haven't done anything with it for a while, but I'm definitely showing signs of improvement. I went out for about 8 miles around Memorial park around 5:30 pm. To break up some of the monotony of running laps on the main trail I ran out on the path to 610 along Memorial and then over to Woodway and back through the park and then ran about 20 minutes on the Ho Chi Minh bike trails. It's kind of interesting running back in the woods on the mountain bike trails with lots of twists and turns and ups and downs. I didn't run too hard since I was doing a long run in another 12 hours. I averaged about 7:25 - 7:30 pace and ran for 61 minutes.

Saturday - 16.4 miles - Kenyan Way long run. I had a solid run today and felt pretty good. I was running late like usual but fortunately the group didn't start as early as I thought they might so I ran into them at the corner of Jackson Hill and Feagin and didn't have to try to catch up with them. Unfortunately I lost my car key somewhere on the run. I had dropped my key into the back pocket on my shorts and it came out somewhere on the run. I hadn't realized that my shorts had a regular key pocket so I put it in the back pocket which is really for energy gels or something like that. I realized about 8 miles in that I didn't have my key and I had no idea where it came out. I didn't push the pace too hard until we got into the park and I was feeling pretty good and started picking up the pace. Sam and Andrew had already taken off earlier from the group, but I wasn't sure I was ready to pick up the pace that early so I stayed with the pack. When I was running quicker around the park, Rob caught up with me and was doing a few miles at his marathon pace so I ran a couple ~6:45 miles with him. I backtracked over the first couple miles of the route and looked for my lost key but didn't see it so I had to run back home and add on a couple more miles. I had been planning on doing about 15, but I was happy to get over 16 and my legs felt pretty good. My garmin battery is low now, but I think I did the 16.4 miles in about 1:58 and averaged ~7:10 pace or so.

If our baby doesn't decide to show up in the next 2 days and I get my Sunday and Monday runs in, I should hit 65+ miles for 7 days from Tuesday - Monday. So far this week I've done about 49 miles in the past 5 days.