buffalo burger = bad (b)idea

I wanted to keep the alliteration going there in the title, but I just couldn’t come up with a way to do it  properly…

Ok, so, two part update:

Tuesday I had a great speed workout… 400 m repeats at ~5k pace. I was being optimistic about my current 5k pace and putting it around 18:30 (A man can dream, right?). I figured running my speed stuff a touch faster couldn’t hurt too much. Then I ended up running consistently about 10 sec. faster on all the repeats! End result: training a bit harder than I probably should have. While I didn’t feel it much yesterday, I think it contributed to my crappy feeling today.

This morning was a short-ish (thankfully) 4 miles. To put it simply, I felt like crap. Last night I went out with my roommate and some friends for our weekly Tuesday night beer. I was in a super good mood, though, because I had just gone climbing and had finished my homework early. So, I had an extra beer (the mugs are huge… like maybe 20 oz?) and a buffalo burger with fries and all the fixins. That might not have been a bad idea in and of itself, but it was like 9:30 pm by this time. Needless to say, this morning I felt…. well, I felt like I had a huge buffalo burger and lots of beer in my stomach – heavy and dehydrated. Add an almost overwhelming feeling of being tired, and it was a long run. Lesson learned.

The next couple of days are 6 mile-ers, so I’m going to make a point of taking better care of myself

sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy

Even though I really dislike most of John Denver’s music that song always comes to mind on sunny days. And, boy, was this weekend packed full of gorgeous days! It was basically between 50 and 60 F every afternoon from Friday to today (Sunday).

Due to some unfortunate planning on Friday, I ended up running in the afternoons for the last couple of days, so I got to enjoy the sunshine while runnin’ around town! This weekend also marked my first run with shorts (in lieu of tights) of the year! That alone was fantastic.

So, I’ve been thinking about my technique a lot lately – specifically about my technique for descents. Previously, I had been of the ‘lean back and take long, slow strides’ technique when running downhill. It seemed like less work to basically fall down the hill, occasionally throwing a foot out there to keep the ground at bay. After a bit of reading (just Google “running downhill” for examples), it appears that leaning forward, and picking up your turnover is better for your legs. For the past week or so, I’ve been practicing this technique. So far, I have to say I’m pleased. It feels great to pick up the cadence on a long run – shake the legs out of their rhythm for a little bit. It also does seem to cause less strain on the knees, which is always good! I’m going to keep practicing this, and we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks…

Anyway, today’s “long run” was definitely not. It was a pleasantly short six miler, that I still ran too fast on. I want my Sunday runs to be around 8-9 min/mile, but I keep coming in around 7-7:30. Short of keeping track of each mile split, I’m going to have to try extra hard to slow it down some more. We’ll see. And you’ll certainly hear what comes of it.

finally friday

(heads up: this post gets kind of graphic near the end. consider yourself warned)

For whatever reason, this has been a particularly exhausting week. I can’t think of any one thing (or things) that made it especially tiring, but I’ve been beat all week. I’ve been feeling a little sick over the last couple of days (congestion, cough, etc), so maybe that’s the explanation. Regardless, my running has been going pretty well in spite of the illness.

Yesterday I had a particularly…. interesting…. run. As I mentioned, I have been pretty congested. This also means that my throat/nose/general lower head & upper chest area have been particularly phlegmy. Anyone who’s tried to run while dealing with this situation knows that it’s pretty awkward and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I just found myself spitting and coughing a little more along the way.

About 10 minutes into my six-miler, my nose started getting extra runny. Now that I’m a proficient snot-rocketeer, I loaded my guns and prepared to fire (i.e. plugged one nostril and aimed to ensure bodily clearance). “FIRE IN THE HOLE,” I said to myself as I let loose. (yeah, i’m that cool… don’t worry about it) A quick inspection of the clean-up part of my gloves (these are almost exactly the ones I wear), revealed a surprising quantity of blood!

What?!

I looked down and my shirt was speckled with red dots, too!

So, that was pretty unexpected! Since the idea of forcibly removing blood from my body like that was a little intense, I tried to avoid “launching any more rockets” for a while. Instead, I was forced to wait until it ran down my sinuses and spit it out with each new batch of phlegm. I kept thinking it would make a good episode of C.S.I. if they were following litte DNA deposits along the road to track down a serial killer.

Thankfully the bleeding stopped after ten minutes or so, and the rest of the run was full of normal-colored phlegm.

On a positive note, though, the run was quite a bit faster than it felt! The pace was just a hair under 7 min/mi. Good stuff. Hopefully this congestion will clear soon, and I can run normally again. (Also, I didn’t go this morning because I had to attend a meeting at 8:30. There was no way I was getting up at 5:00 to go running, so I’m going to go this afternoon between my classes.)

good way to start a day

It’s just a hair shy of midday, and even though I haven’t gotten anything work-related done, I’m still feeling pretty good about today.

A bit of backstory… yesterday’s rest day was incredibly welcome after the blistering long run I had on Sunday. I had intended to do my 12 miles at approx. 8-9:00 min/mile, and ended up clocking about 1:27, or about 7:30 min/mile average! Not only was 12 miles a new distance PR for me… that pace is undoubtedly the top fast/far combo I’ve ever done! And since I spent all of Saturday skiing, I was pretty stoked about the whole thing.

So, rest yesterday, speed today. Fartleks, round 2. This time, however, I felt great. Well, it was actually quite painful; the end result felt great, though. Thankfully, there was no snow and it was actually super nice outside. Perfect speed weather at about 30 F. Then I made a great egg scramble for breakfast, and headed to school (where I am currently procrastinating).

I have lofty goals today, so I’m going to get back to work. Tonight Jorge Cham (PhD Comics) is speaking on campus, so I’m pretty pumped to see him. If you’re a grad student and you haven’t read the strip, you need to start. It’s aimed more toward natural science/math grad students, but there are a few cameos from humanities/social science characters.

Here’s hoping the rest of the day is productive!

holy eyesight batman

After a few months of squinting at the blackboard, I finally made an appointment with an optometrist. While there, I was pretty amazed at how twisting all sorts of knobs and flipping switches could make my vision change so rapidly I thought I was on LSD or something. I seriously almost got motion-sick from him swapping the different things in front of my eyes. But, when all was said and done, he was like “If you could read that line with no trouble, you’d have 20/20 vision.” I squinted, said I might be able to guess it if my life depended on it, and then he put the big eye-machine thing in front of my face. “This is what it will look like with your prescription,” he said. At this point, I actually yelled “Holy crap, I can see!” Ha.

So, I got my new glasses this morning. I put them on, turned around in a circle, and almost passed out. The woman was like “Your eyes will need some time to adjust to them,” which I would have greatly appreciated knowing before I tried to do my best Scott Hamilton. Nevertheless, when I got to school, I put them on again, and started looking around.

My eyesight sucked before!

I guess my brain did a good job of convincing me that it wasn’t so bad, but there was no arguing with the glasses-on/glasses-off comparison. I looked out the window and could actually read a small sign that was probably 200 yards away! Amazing. I’m looking forward to being able to spend less time trying to figure out what the blackboard says, and more time trying to figure out what the hell a hypergeometric equation is.

Oh, and I ran six miles this morning, too. I was thinking “Man, this is feeling pretty tough today…” for the whole time. But, when I looked at my watch at the end, I realized I’d been running about 20 sec/mi faster than I intended! So… bad news: a little more tired today; good news: running 20 sec/mi faster is reasonable.

And now for something completely different…

Let’s recap the last 15 hours or so of weather: Wednesday, 4:00 pm, 60 F and sunny. A gorgeous day. Thursday, 7:30 am, 20 F and FOUR INCHES OF SNOW. We all know how much I love running in the snow. It’s especially a bummer if you were planning to get up and run six miles in the sun.

*sigh*

So, yeah, it was (still is) coming down like crazy outside. Most of the sidewalks had been cleared at some point in the night, so there was only three inches of snow left to trod through. I had to stop and pick compacted ice out of my treads a couple times, too. But, on the flip side, it is pretty out.

Oh, and it’s Valentine’s Day. Buuuuuut, let’s just say that doesn’t really affect me this year. Bummer.

I’ll probably still go buy some awesome chocolate

fell a bit behind

I don’t imagine there are throngs of people clicking refresh on this blog everyday (in fact, the stats page says it’s gotten a whole THREE views since inception!), but I still feel guilty that it’s been so long since my last post.

I made some poor choices with my school work and outside obligations a couple weeks ago, and fell terribly behind. I think I’m just about done cleaning up the mess that was last weekend. I’ve made a vow to myself that I will do a better job of managing my workload. My goal is to try and spread it out more evenly; I currently use a “long-intense-homework-sessions-on-the-weekends” strategy that is kind of painful. My hope is that by doing some stuff during the week, I can reduce stress. We’ll see.

In other news, my last Sunday long run felt GREAT! It was a new distance pr for me, at eleven miles. I felt great and finished in about eighty minutes! I was hoping to run around 8-9:00 per mile, so coming in at ~7:20 was a pleasant shock. I had a couple days of acute knee pain last week when running, but didn’t feel a thing on Sunday’s run. Hopefully it was a temporary issue!

This morning was the second of my new speed training days. Hills this morning. We certainly have a lot of them around here, and they definitely took the juice out of my quads and hammies

One other random update: I’ve had great vision for most of life. Over the past couple months, I’ve noticed the blackboard has become a bit tougher to read. So, I finally went to the optometrist this morning, and turns out I’m near-sighted in one eye and have a mild astigmatism in both! So much for that streak, eh? After a grueling session of the “Do these frames look good on me?” game, I made my choice and come Friday, I’ll have an extra set of eyes. Apparently it’s a pretty mild prescription in the grand scheme of things, and hey, if I can actually read my profs’ handwriting now, count me in!

More frequent updates will ensue, I promise. For now, it’s time to get some more work done.

antsy in my pantsies

This morning it was chilly (20 F) and I was really slow getting out of the house. Five miles today… just below the max of my current weekday runs. I slept well last night, but had a difficult time getting motivated to do this run. Once I got out on the road and my brain started waking up, I started tossing around thoughts about my day. [Side note: another thing I love about running is the time it affords you to think and plan and contemplate]

Thursdays are mostly work-days for me (no classes to attend, just some TA-ing for a couple hours), and I started getting excited about attacking the mountain of work that has piled up on me this week. I had a great little plan laid out and I think I got a little too excited about getting started. Before I knew it, I was halfway done with my run (important note: the first half of the run today was downhill… the second half, uphill) and had expended far too much energy.

Long story short… by the time I got back up to where I had started, I was gasping like a goldfish in Death Valley. I guess even though you can let your mind float a little bit, you still have to pay attention to your pace if you want a practical run. Oh well, another lesson learned.

stupid snow

After a happily-accepted rest day on Monday, yesterday was the start of our speed training. To inaugurate the new habit-to-be, I ran three miles of Fartleks. I hadn’t actually done them since high school, and certainly forgot how draining they can be! That said, the worst part of the workout was the four inches of snow we got the night before. Which brings me to the title of this posting.

Ordinarily, I love snow. It’s beautiful. It makes me want a wood stove and someone to sit in front of it with. You can throw it at other people and not hurt them (most of the time). But one place where I do not love snow is under my feet while running. I think most people will attest to the fact that you run all funky when it’s icy/snowy out. Very different stride and overall mechanics. Worse still, is when you have to try and sprint on it! I imagine myself at the start of each speed interval looking like the Roadrunner – legs spinning around in full circles, dust kicking up behind me, until finally I got some traction and took off…

*sigh* Okay, that’s the end of the that rant….. almost….. this morning was equally icy and I cursed it a few times, too. I’m just looking forward to runs in warm, dry weather again!

money in the bank

I had a fantastic track & field coach in college. He was young and inspiring. He had gone to our college and still held a couple of the college records for various events. He was a great coach because he understood what we were going through on a day-to-day basis, and he also knew how to reach us in a very personal way; sometimes that’s what makes the difference between a mediocre athlete and a great athlete – a personal coach.
Once during pre-season, he authored what I thought was an incredibly inspirational message to the team. We had just come off a really tough workout; the kind the makes you think about quitting and playing intramural sports. Paraphrasing his message, it went something like this: “Every time you come to practice, you’re putting money in the bank. Every second you put in on the track goes into your piggy bank so that when the day comes that you need to cash in and put up big, you’ve got six months worth of savings to back you up.” I’m not sure why exactly, but I found his message incredibly inspiring. I think of it often, especially when workouts get tough.

Today was a perfect example.

Today’s long run (Sunday, as usual) was 10 miles. I’ve done it before (thrice, now), but today hurt. I felt slow, sort of sore, slightly out of breath, and generally crappy. But, right around 60 minutes, I remembered “money in the bank…” and I was able to find the energy to keep on trucking. I was running with a friend, and without any preface I muttered “money in the bank,” and she responded with an understandably confused look. I didn’t bother to explain; it was more for me than anything else.

Every time my runs get painful and long, I just think about putting “money in the bank,” and about how on 15 June I’m going to need all the savings I’ve got to cross the finish line.

That keeps me going. Thanks, coach.