this weekend may end me…

Again, it’s been too long since my last post.  Perhaps this is becoming the new average.  Hopefully it’s just the combination of having been on break last week, having another recruiting weekend this weekend, and trying to wrap up the semester.  I’ve got a ridiculous amount of work to do in the next 36 hours (yikes), and am already feeling pretty tired.  

We had another recruiting party last night, but this one was MUCH more hardcore  I think I finally left my friend’s place at around 2:30 am or so, and I was certainly not the last one to leave.  Needless to say, I’m pooped today.  I just got in another 5 miles (supposed to be 8 today, but I’m hiking ~3 miles with the recruits in a couple hours).  It was super windy and super hilly, so it was kind of tough.  But it’s done.  Tomorrow’s an “easy” Sunday at 10 miles, so hopefully that will be a good recovery run. 

Even though this week hasn’t been a total bust, I’m definitely behind in mileage.  I’m hopeful that next week will be back to normal.  

Oh, and I should mention… I picked up new shoes earlier this week.  I think Mizuno stopped making the Wave Inspire 3, which I had been wearing for a while.  I was a huge fan of them, but they just changed some design elements and called ‘em the Inspire 4.  So far, they’ve felt much the same.  

Well, I need to get some work done, but I just wanted to post an ‘I’m still alive’ post.  ’Til next time. 

way off schedule

The trip to Nevada was fantastic, but boy oh boy am I off my running schedule…. turns out climbing all day doesn’t leave enough energy to run. Plus, we left NV yesterday at around 9:00 am, and I got home at 8:00 am this morning (virtually non-stop driving)! On top of eating nothing but junk for the entire drive, I was not feeling an 18 mile run today. I’m gonna go out now and get 5 in. I think I’ll shift this week around and try to put the 18er on Tuesday. We’ll see… but stay tuned for updates. Man, I’m tired…

ok, I think I’m back…

Man, it’s actually been really hard to post so infrequently. I have this work/grading to do, and all I can think about is “Geez, I’d really like to write up a quick post now…”

Alas, I’m doing my best to prioritize this semester. BUT, here I am. Through a random series of events [went climbing late last night, forgot I had to read a bunch of applications/grade them, didn't get to bed until 2:00 am, realized that waking up at 7:30 wasn't going to give me enough time to run] I’m not running this morning. Unfortunately, I decided this upon waking. Otherwise, I might have picked up an extra 30 minutes or an hour of sleep. Oh well.

So, there has definitely been at least one significant update since last time. Sunday’s long run was an amazing sixteen miles! New distance PR! And, I finally decided it was silly for me to be running such long distances without food or liquids. So after a bit of online research, I picked up a nutrition belt from Nathan on Saturday. I went with that one because it was pretty small/simple, and I believe I can add more bottle holders if necessary.

Boy, oh boy, did that ever make a HUGE difference! I set an alarm for 45 minutes while running, and chowed down an Accel Gel and one bottle of water/Gatorade mix each time. I’ll admit that it was a little awkward trying to run/eat/drink, but I’ll get better at it. Needless to say, about twenty minutes after I had the first one, I could tell that I was feeling better.

Long story short, by the time I got to the last mile, I felt like I still had some juice and even kicked in a little bit. While I was kinda thirsty, it wasn’t NEARLY as bad as the previous long runs. Overall, it was great. And, the whole thing took me about 2:07… an average of sub-eight minute miles. Kick. Ass.

Our break is next week, so I think I’ll be able to get back on a normal posting schedule. Here’s hoping.

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

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.)

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.