Category: exercise

I was supposed to run yesterday. Was going to get up early. But I slept in instead. It was cold. I was tired. Mostly, I was tired. Bleh. So I told myself I would run after work.

But after work it was pouring down rain. Double-bleh. No good. I toyed with the idea of going to the gym, but I hate the gym, so I puttered around home, cleaning stuff, and went to bed early.

Got up this morning, 4:30 in the frickin’ AM, and it was still cold, and still kind of raining, just that stupid misty kind of rain that’s heavier than fog, but not heavy enough to be, y’know, actual rain. I was going to go back to bed, but then I realized that a) it would really put me off my schedule I had planned for this week, and b) it could very well be full-on raining tonight when I get home from work, just like yesterday. So I threw on my running clothes, fed the cat, and headed outside.

This is going to be Speed Week! What a poor kick-off, huh? A day late. Oh, well. The plan was this: run down to the local high school, about 1.4 miles according to Mapquest, as a warm-up. Then alternate a lap on the track (400 meters) at at least an 8:50 pace, which is about 30 seconds faster than my normal race pace, with 2-3 minutes of fast walking (jogging if I can handle it). Then I’ll head home again.

The run to the track was about 14:10. The pace calculator told me that 400 meters at an 8:50 pace would mean one lap is about 2:11. So I set the timer on my trusty Timex Expedition to 2:11 and aimed to finish each lap before the beeper went off. And I did! My worst time was about 2:00 even, which means I did about an 8:00 pace or better. Yay, me!

Then I tried to run home. Triple-bleh. The run home took 17:07. Still, it was a good workout!

Tomorrow evening I’m doing hill intervals. Friday I’ll do my long run, and practice speeding up for the middle 3 miles. Then it’s back to the track on Hallowe’en… spoooooky.

I decided to take last week off from running. Tired, felt like I was coming down with a cold, blah and meh. Just didn’t have the energy for it.

So today was my first day running since last Friday. Last Friday I felt really fast, on a long (5+ mile) run. But after taking a week off, I was slow on a shorter route (3.5 miles).

I’m going to throw some days in next week that focus on speed. At least once next week I’m thinking of running from my house to Milwaukie High School (about 1.4 miles one-way) and doing some intervals on the track there. And another day I think I’m going to do hill intervals. Yeah. That’ll be good.

The weather’s been icky; cold and showers off-and-on. Hopefully I can keep my motivation to run now that it’s not warm and sunny. I ran in January, February and March this year… but I can’t remember what the weather was like then. Had to be cold and rainy, right? Right? So why’s it affecting me so negatively now? Might be the stoopid election draining away my motivation. I’m obsessed with watching the news, trying to catch the Republicans trying to steal the election. There’s signs of it everywhere (head over to Geeks Against Bush and dig through the posts there for some details, I’ll keep that stuff out of my personal blog for now) and it’s consuming all of my attention.

Whoops! Started out talking about running and ended on politics. See? It’s all I can think about!

Quick note: on my run in to work today, I kept track of my split times, and was running pretty fast during the first 2-3 miles of it; first mile and a half was between 8:00 and 8:30 per mile! Whoo-HOO!

‘Course, I couldn’t maintain that pace for the whole 5.14 miles, but I did end up with a total time this morning of 48:23.41! If that’s not my best time for that distance it’s damned close. Go see for yourself.

I went for a run this morning. Needed at least 4.2 miles to reach my goal of 16 miles for the week. Not sure how many I actually did, but I added at least 1/2 mile to my “Four Parks Run”, by running along the Springwater Corridor trail at least a quarter-mile past where the trail goes into Oaks Bottom and then back again.

I was slow today; ran the 4.4 miles in about the same time I ran over 5 miles on Friday, but the course I did today was a bit tougher; more hills, including a very steep trail that connects Oaks Bottom and Sellwood Park, so I’m happy with my time.

When I got back home, though, I collapsed on the couch, unable to move much at all. Smacky, my kitten, came over and started to attack me as he normally does (maybe I was just setting myself up when I named him “Smacky” ’cause that’s all he seems to do), but as soon as he started to play-bite me, he stopped… sniffed me a lot… smelled my sweat, still drying on my skin… and then started licking the sweat off my arm. Cats are strange strange creatures.

He’s grown so much since I got him. I need more pictures of him, if only he’d sit still long enough for me to take them. He enjoys getting up on the bathtub ledge, between the shower curtain and transparent liner, when I’m taking a shower. It’s hilarious when he slips and falls in the tub. Well, hilarious as long as he doesn’t attack my feet or legs.

My friend Caleb called me up last night and asked me if I wanted to run in the Race for the Cure this morning. I thought, hey, great; dress all in black, sing depressing songs.

Oh, no, wait… wrong Cure.

But, hey, boobies! I like boobies. I think we should save as many boobies as possible. It’s a good cause. So I got up early this morning, and ran in the co-ed 5K. I did pretty good, too. My “unofficial” time, as reported by my trusty Timex Expedition, was 32:24.18, but I want to subtract 2:04 because it took me that long to just reach the starting line. There was quite a crowd; Becky and Caleb thought there was around 33,000 folks running today. My “official” time will include the 2:04, and might be a bit longer, too, because of the crowd at the finish gate. I stopped my watch when I went under the finish banner. At any rate, I was pretty happy with how I did.

The course went south on Front Ave., turned west then north down Broadway, then all the way to Burnside. Just before Burnside we passed by another monument to boobies, Mary’s Club. Hooray! We crossed the Burnside Bridge, which was a bit of a hill. It was impressive to see the crowd of people filling the east-bound lanes of the bridge! When we were on the bridge, the faster folks were on the other side, returning across the bridge. Man they were fast. We cheered them on. Then the route turned south again and went down MLK Jr. Blvd, looped back, and crossed the Burnside Bridge going west. Looped underneath, and finished back on Front Ave.

I ran for beer last weekend, and I ran for boobies this weekend. Say… they should combine those two events. (I totally stole that joke from a friend. Thanks, Deb!)

Team Saponified was represented by one member today. I ran the Pints to Pasta 10K this morning. I ran it strong; only stopped twice for the water stations. My unofficial time, thanks to my trusty Timex Expedition, was 59:59.49, or a 9:39.481 pace (give or take a few). Which is almost exactly what my pace was in the Run Hit Wonder 10K a month and a half ago, at least my “chip time” — it’s 2:40 faster than my gun time in that race. Damn. For some reason I thought I did better.

Still, it felt good. Lots of downhills, which probably helped quite a bit. Started in north Portland, along the bluff on Willamette Avenue, ran down the hill to N. Interstate, then across the Steel Bridge, along Waterfront Park, and then finished at the Old Spaghetti Factory off of Macadam. There were a lot of people. I noticed a bunch of people with black Adidas dri-fit overshirts, emblazoned with the Pints-to-Pasta logo and asked about them; those were the race shirts from last year. This year they just gave out regular cotton t-shirts. Oh, well, at least I got soup, two beers, and a coupon for dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. Oh, and a coupon for a free Cinnabon which will be my reward later today. Mmmmm…

Not bad for my second-ever 10K.

It was kinda fun to look around at all these people and think, “I’ve got something in common with all of them.” Struck up a few conversations, although for some reason it’s difficult for me to come out of my shell lately.

I’m running in the Pints to Pasta 10K tomorrow morning. I have to be down at the Old Spaghetti Factory off of Macadam Blvd. around 7:00 AM, pick up my packet, then catch a shuttle bus to the start of the race in North Portland. It’s going to be fun. It’s my second-ever 10K (the Run Hit Wonder on August 1st being my first), and I’ve been taking it easy on the running since that last race. I was going to run in Tillamook a couple of weeks ago but ended up in a car accident instead. Oh, no one was hurt, but it still put the kibosh on the drive to the coast.

I’m not sure what to expect for this race but I’m going to do my best. I should be going to bed soon, but I have to go pick up a FlexCar to use tomorrow. Bummer, huh?

I’ll get a t-shirt, two free beers, some soup, and a dinner coupon for the Old Spaghetti Factory, plus live music and the accomplishment of running a freakin’ six-plus miles. Yay, me. I’m going to be using my new Nike Air Structure Triax 8’s in the race. Oh… maybe not. Maybe I should stick with my trusty Brooks Addiction GTS 5s… yeah, running a race in brand-new shoes is probably a Bad Idea.

I’ll post any pictures and my impressions of the run tomorrow afternoon.

Ran to work this morning. 5.05 miles, 47:56.47 total time, therefore a 9:29 pace. Arrgh, can’t seem to achieve a 9:00 or better pace for the longer distances. I was doing close to a 9:00 pace for the first couple of miles but had to pull back a bit.

My hamstrings are tight; especially my right one. I used to be able to touch my toes pretty easily but lately not so much. I need to focus on stretching more, maybe during like Deb does. Stop at the halfway point and stretch out. At any rate, that might be part of the problem.

I think I’ll call Jessica and schedule another massage for the week after the Tillamook run. That might help, too.

Ran up Terwilliger Blvd. yesterday morning. Do I need to post the details? I’ve written about it before. About 5 miles round trip, Dunniway Park up to the Charthouse restaurant and back down again. Ran with a friend, kept a pretty easy pace, legs felt tired and a little sore but overall it was a good tired. Oh, my hamstrings (especially my right one, the leg that’s a little longer than the other) were tight and hard to stretch out. I’ll focus on stretching them better before and after my next run, which will be tomorrow morning to work, another approximately 5 mile run.

Diet-wise, as of last night I’m about 100 calories over for the week starting Monday. I went over yesterday by 150 or so, but that’s OK because my energy output was higher yesterday due to the run. I have noticed a slight downward trend, already, in the running average of my weight, so it’s having an effect. Yay, me.

My weight has snuck up over my pre-determined upper limit (limit was 175; my average weight over the past week has been 178.5) so I’ve put myself back on maintainence. That means I’m limiting myself to around 2500 calories for a month. Only exception will be race days. Any day I race I don’t keep track of calories.

Last night, my first full day on the new restricted diet, I had exactly 2500 calories. Funny how that worked out, especially considering I had been starving all day long! OK, not really. I’m sure it was psychological, simply because I was thinking about food again all day. Focus on food, get hungry. I mean, my normal eating pattern is 3000-3100 calories per day, so I’m not reducing it that much.

At any rate, I’m going to focus on eating enough protein this time around, which, for a 175 lb. male is around 75-80 grams per day. I’ll calculate it for yesterday; so far today I’ve had 4. I’m going to have to really chow down to make my goal today, huh?

Exercise-wise, I ran in the hot hot heat yesterday. I was going to get up and run in the early morning, which is the best time during the summer, all that nice cool air, and little to no traffic, but decided to sleep in instead. I packed a bag of running clothes to take to work, but it was way way too hot at lunchtime. Thought about going to the gym and running on the treadmill… but that wasn’t appealing. Only as a last resort. So I ended up waiting until after sunset and running a short 2 1/4 mile course in my neighborhood. And it was still hot hot hot outside. Bleh.

Haven’t been posting a schedule because I’m not working towards anything. Got some races coming up (and if the guys buy into my suggestions for the road trip, I’ll have some very grueling races coming up! See yesterday’s post) but I’m just running for fun and fitness right now.