Tag Archives: My Running

08262018 – Run

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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.

08112018 – Run

Leave a reply

Definitely not what I was expecting when I set out for a run this morning. I had no doubts it would be tough. 12 miles on the trails at Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park wouldn’t be easy. But I didn’t expect it to be this hard. 

The humidity was almost 100%, but it was in the mid-60’s at the start. I wore my vest to get used to it and had both bottles full of water and a random veggie protein gummies for some food. I hadn’t needed anything yet so I felt safe with that. 

I set my virtual pacer at 8:40 and set off from the Lawrence Ceeek trailhead and ran towards Delaware Lake. I stopped to take a rock out of my shoe and was able to hit goal pace for mile 1. 

That would be the last time I would see an 8 minute mile through out. I haven’t run in that part of the park in awhile but I got through the wooden steps and ran the Fall Creek trail to the Camp Creek trail and past the Duck Pond. Somewhere in here I took my first walk break. I felt tired. I came back down around Delaware Lake and onto the paved bike trail back towards my car and the Schoen Creek trail. 

The Schoen Creek trail is a tough trail that I ran a few times when we were here in January. I was glad to see afterwards that I got some segment PRs despite not running superfast today. My thought process had been to run the East side easier trails as a warmup, then Schoen as they are the hardest and end with the Lawrence Creek loop as it is easier than Schoen and I’ve run it a lot more. 

Schoen is hard with lots of ups and downs and it seems like it goes forever! Since I had just ridden it yesterday it didn’t seem as long, but I guess since I was running so slow it did take forever! Also running the trail doesn’t seem as dangerous as I thought it was riding it (some of the trail is on the edge of the hill). 

I knew the distance was going to be close at the end of the run. Seeing the road bikers do repeats up the hill I was inspired to run up the hill to the visitor center and get a sustained hill in the middle of the run. Getting up there I finished my gummies and wished I had more food. I ran around the flat area on top and did an extended walking break. Then back down the hill and onto Lawrence Creek trail. 

I figured the trail would be busier than the others so I took my headphones out so I could hear bikes approaching me. Turns out none passed me until the last half mile and then it was a bunch! I kept trying to set goals to keep myself running and not walking. Finally I was determined to go a whole mile without stopping and completed Mile 10 without stopping and ran a lot of it around my goal pace even if the overall mile time was still in the 10 minute range. I added the Camp Glenn loop to get some extra miles in and that was a nice easy trail. I passed a dad out with his kids and he said hello and his kids asked if we were friends! After completing that mile I walked for a few minutes and then set out running again. Somewhere in there I decided that I needed to run at a slower pace so that I could keep running. That worked fairly well, but I still walked a little at the end of mile 11. Next goal was to run all of the last mile. Which I did except to let the bikers go by. There was probably 8 that went by in a short period of time. After finishing the 12th mile I walked a little bit but when I came upon the exit trail I knew I could keep running it. 

So bam I finished. 12.34 miles in 2:18:56. 11:15 average pace. My virtual partner was set at 8:40. So I was pretty far off that. I think the travel and walking around at the Indiana State Fair caught up with me. 

I also need to make sure I take better nutrition and add a bottle of electrolytes to help get me over the hump.