Category Archives: My Running

08282018 – Run

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Man 4:30am came way too early.  With school back and a new work schedule be at work at 7am and the kids getting on the bus 15 minutes before that mornings are tight.  So… back to 4:30am runs.  Yuck!  It was hard to get up this morning.

But I had a good run of 8x400m with 2:00 minutes of rest. I might need new batteries in my head lamp, but there are so many shadows on the trail it seemed hard to want to push and not stumble, especially in the grassy areas.

Here are my splits:

2:11

2:20

2:19

2:06

2:14

2:18

1:58

2:22

4.71 miles in 51:11

 

08262018 – Run

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Today was so humid that at the end of my run my fingers were starting to prune up a little bit.  At least it was relatively cool through the whole run!  I picked a route that I’ve ridden before but never run and when I’ve ridden it is been 12 miles.  So I thought it would work for 13.1.  I was quite off and needed to add a good amount of trails at Wirth to get there.

I started out running from my house and ran to the Mississippi River.  I haven’t run along the river in a long time. Especially this section.  The run was a Time Trial, so I wanted to find the balance of going fast, but surviving the entire 13 miles.  I set my Virtual Pacer for 9 minute miles and thought that would be good.  I was a little shocked when I came through the first mile in 8:13. Ok, no problem slow down a little bit… Crap.  I came through the 2nd mile in 7:52.  That was not going to be a sustainable pace for the whole thing. I turned off the River onto Cedar Lake Trail and my pace finally slowed down to 8:37.  I haven’t run on such flat easy places for awhile and my body wanted to move!  The Cedar Lake Trail is pretty straight forward urban trail that turns into a prairie trail.. I did 8:15 and then 8:34 for mile 5.

I wanted to run the dirt trails on the East side of Cedar Lake and to add some distance I ran all the way to where they actually start on the southside and ran back around the lake.  I never ran these trails enough to know what the best routes are or an easy way to add a nice loop.  One time in there I had to backtrack quite a bit.  I ended up running less than a mile in the dirt trail section.  Mile 6 was 8:48.  Running on the paved trails around Cedar Lake are so nice with the sun coming over the trees and downtown sparkling. I ran past all the beaches and extended the run by going out onto the points when possible.  Mile 7 was 9:25, 8 was 10:23, and 9 was 9:38.  I was definitely feeling tired at this point.  I had been drinking some, but the food I brought wasn’t very good and was hard to eat.

It was right before mile 9 that I turned off the pavement and was on trails for most of the rest of the run.  I knew that from Cedar Point beach home it would be about 3 miles on the Parkways. So when I ran past it before hitting 8 miles I would need to make up a lot of miles somewhere.  I’ve not run around Brownie Lake, but I probably should have tried today!

Obviously being back on the trails at Wirth was going to slow down my pace unless I tried to pick it up. Feeling tried at that point wasn’t ideal, but I kept pushing on.  I ended up walking some of the uphills. Mile 10 was 12:55, 11 was 12:19, and 12 was 11:20.  Mile 11 was the end of the dirt trails and back on the parkway.  I went past the Trailhead at around 11.5 miles.  The Trailhead is only a half mile from home, so I had to keep going!  It is always sad to pass my road and know I need to keep running!  I hit Mile 13 at the top of the hill on Golden Valley Road in 13:31 and then knew it was all downhill from there on out!  I stopped about 1/4 mile down the road and hit 8:33 pace again.  I decided to stop my watch and walk the last few blocks home (uphill).

My plantar fasciitis foot was really hurting at the front of the arch.  Hopefully it recovers quickly.  I also need to get my nutrition figured out for the race.  I did order some gel packets and will bring a bar or two to have during the race.

Just a few more weeks to go!

08242018 – Run

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I didn’t run yesterday because Christy was working a 6:30am shift and I didn’t want to get up at 4:30 to go for a run!  I also wasn’t sure how long the run would take since it wasn’t a straight forward 6×600 or something.  The workout was 3×200, 3×400, and 2×1000.

My Garmin also isn’t nice enough to be able to put in multiple distances for interval work like this. So I set it up for 45×200 with a custom rest. The recovery for the first 6 was 90 seconds so I figured walking/jogging a 200 would be about that. I think I messed up the math to get to 45, but that’s not surprising. I also messed up a few times hitting the buttons and keeping track of the intervals. I did end up with 51 intervals (including warmup and cooldown).

So I’m not really sure how to write down or track the intervals. Looking at the intervals it appears that my fastest intervals were the 400’s because they were on the pavement at Schaper Park. Trying to keep track of 5×200 for a 1000m interval seems easy, but it wasn’t really… I either did an 800, 1000, or 1200.  Not really the end of the world, but not ideal either.

i have to do it again next week too.  Maybe I should find a track or a loop with a set distance. We’ll see.

08212018 – Run

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Today felt great. It felt good to run in the morning and to be running at Wirth. And 6×400 seemed manageable.  But, it was dark! Yikes.  Having not run at 5:30 recently I didn’t realize that it had gotten to be time for the darkness to be on my running. Another sign of summer ending would be early morning dark runs again.  At least it was daylight midway through the run. I am definitely not ready for running the whole run in the dark.  I might need a new headband and it was a little loose and flopped around a little while running.

6×400 with 3 minutes rest in between wasn’t easy, but after the longer runs it felt good to get back to something shorter.

The splits were:

2:10

2:29

2:04

2:03

1:53

1:58

My total was 4.54 miles in 48:42.   I’m satisfied with that.  It seems to be in line with how I’ve been running.  I didn’t get lost, but in the dark I ended up on a trail I hadn’t meant to get on.

08182018 – Run

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This was the first of two half marathons that I will run.  I had looked at trying to do a race for one of them and actually almost signed up for the Bluff Tuff race or the Mendota Bottoms 10 miler.  I probably should have but it was also nice to save the money and get to sleep in a little bit!

I’m actually writing this a week later so I won’t remember the details…  I started out with the event trails at Wirth.  I ran North first to get some distance in and then ran down to the starting point of Karate Monkey trails. And then did them, skipping the spaghetti loop. After exiting the Karate Monkey trails I ran along the cart path up the sledding hill and turned and kept going up to the upper stadium and jumped onto the trails there.  From there I finished out the Area 36 loop with the shortcut through the Quarry and then ran the entire Area 36 loop with The Tube.  This actually earned me the 8th overall time for the loop!  The 2.5 mile loop has 80ft of elevation gain and took me 28:38 to complete.

After completing the loop I grabbed some water at the Trailhead fountains and then did my normal Wirth loop backwards through the Bog.  I had to get a little creative on the Butler side of the park to get more miles in.  I knew that when I left the park by Xerxes I’d have a mile to go straight home.  I ended up hitting that point with about a mile and a half left.  So I added on some extra sections and kept heading towards home.  I passed all my normal cut thru’s and hit 13 miles just north of the main parking lot and finished out the run completing 13.28 miles in 2:23:07.  I got about 1,000 feet of elevation gain for the entire run.

There were only a few flat sections so my pace never really got close to where my “goal” pace should have been.  My mile splits were really all over the place with mile 10 being the slowest.  I did walk some of the hills after the halfway point and I didn’t really take on much nutrition throughout.