I’m still alive!

Yikes, it’s been far too long since I’ve been back here. It’s been a hectic couple of weeks; school has been very intense, and a few of my best friends from college also came out to stay with me for a few days, too! Everyone has now left (bummer), so hopefully I can get back into school-mode and get my work done (I pretty much paused all school work while they were here… they’re my best friends, after all). We got in some beautiful skiing while they were out here (I traded a short run day for a ski day… seemed like a reasonable trade), which was fun. They went up once more, too, while I stayed home and did a little work.

Mostly, running has been fine. Unexciting, but fine. With all the hecticness (?) of the past week, it seemed my running was a little off balance. Probably just because of the shake up in the routine. But, I did have a good speed day yesterday. It was three one-mile repeats at 5k-10k pace. I decided to shoot for 6-6:30 min/mi pace (about a 19:00 5k, which was about where I ran in the Fall… though I’ve yet to break 19:00…), and was reasonably consistent. It was tough to find a mile strip that I could run without having to worry about intersections/cars. I found a section of road that only had one big intersection, but it had four-way stop signs so I was fine. The start and finish were two major roads with traffic lights and stuff, so it was tight. Anyway, I ran ~6:15, 5:55, 6:30, which looks kind of funky until you know that it was uphill one way and downhill the other way (~200 ft vertical). You can probably figure out which one was run downhill.

Spring break is in a week and a half, at which point I hope things will settle down a little bit. Until then, I’m just hanging on the best I can.

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

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!

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.

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!