Going the extra mile in August

I just finished my running for August and I am pretty sure this has been the best training month meaning where I have done the most running, and setting a personal best!

This month I ran a total of 94 miles! That includes weekend runs of 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 (this morning) miles as well as averaging 11+ miles per week. It has certainly helped that I did not travel and I have definitely had mornings where I wish I could stay in bed. For example we met at 5:30 this morning which meant I had to get up at 5 am to get ready. I woke up at 4am so I was juuust starting to get drowsy when the alarm went off. But, I knew I had to get out there and I knew that the others would be out there waiting for me, and they were. The last two runs were along the Los Gatos Creek trail which takes me past some of our old haunts from when we lived over in Saratoga including multiple parks and lakes. We are starting about 20 minutes before dawn so we start in the dark along the trail. At the beginning we are generally together but the faster folks take off after a short time.

I've really tried to focus this month in order to set a good foundation for my 1/2 marathon in early October. I still have two longer runs to go, a 12 and 13 miler which I will do in September. The 13 miler will be basically the same length as the race so once I complete that there will be no doubt about whether I can finish the race. The main challenge will be to keep from going out at too fast of a running pace.

With two weeks to go before the race I'll taper, running less and less per week, until I run just two 3-4 mile runs the week of the race just to stay loose.

Too much?

A friend of mine Darren (not one to withhold an opinion) recently told me that I was blogging too much about my exercise and not enough about the kids! While that is probably true for the family readers I like to "put it in print" - to write down my accomplishments so that I can go back and look at them sometime in the future to see how far I have either progressed or fallen.

So I'll take the ding and try to do some more family blogs but that said I did ride a bike 10 miles and run a 5k this morning in less than an hour!

I must say I felt pretty good about that!

Starting the day with a 10k

Well my workouts have been going reasonably well and I've finally started to feel like I was back to the level prior to all of my travel in May/June. As proof, our (regular exercise group) got an extra early start at 5:45 and went for a long run. I ended up going for 6.5 miles which is just slightly longer than the 10K I ran a couple of months ago.

I think it is pretty good when your training run is now the length of races you were doing just a few months ago!

Hopefully my joints can hold out for that kind of pounding!

Still at it

It has been a few weeks since my last post, a longer gap than I like. During the last couple of weeks we have had visitors but I have been able to keep up with the exercise routine. One funny thing is that in the same two week period I had one person give me a hard time about my running pace (9-10m miles generally) and one person express concern that I don't over do it (see previous post). So if this were an election I guess I would be about right!

It's not though and yesterday we went and pushed it even harder with our routine. We rode bikes for 7 miles, stopped, ran for 32 minutes, then got back on the bikes and rode for another 8 miles.

So I figure my total workout was a 15 mile ride and 3-3.5 miles of running all before 7:30am. Not a bad way to start a Saturday!

Pain Given Out in 3 Minute Intervals

Today the folks I have been running with introduced me to one of their more masochistic routines which really wore me out.

It is pretty hard to find hills in Santa Clara (it is pretty flat) but they found an area along a trail that we run which goes up and down from trial level to river level and back. Basically in a 1/4 mile stretch you go up, down, up, down where the hills are about 60yds long up and down with a very short flat stretch in between. It does not sound like much but believe me it is.

The plan today was to run 12 intervals on these little hills. The interval times started off at 3:20, 3:00, 2:40. Basically we started slower and built up doing each interval twice totalling 6 runs, and then repeated the whole thing.

You can pretty easily finish the first couple of intervals faster than 3:20, so you get about 30+s of rest in between. But... then the intervals get shorter and you get more tired, meaning you have less time to rest. The other folks are in better shape than me so they always had at least 10-15S rest in between. Me on the other hand got pretty tired after the first 5 intervals and found myself needing to start right away after finishing. Whew!

In the end I was so tired that I only lasted for 10 intervals. So I ended up with basically 30 minutes of straight hill running (oh by the way we ran to and from the hills, about 3/4 of a mile each way). Supposedly this will make out flat runs faster. I am not sure if I was working old muscles in a new way or new muscles in an old way but either way it was painful doled out in 3 minute intervals. I'll have to try it again just to see if I have improved.