Today again I felt bad in the morning and slept in. So, I ran again this evening. I did the same thing as yesterday, 7.5 miles around here plus a couple strides. My legs feel great. Now I just need to get to where I can breathe normally and I’ll be all set.
This morning I had an early meeting plus I didn’t feel well, so I didn’t wake up really early to run. However, I knew I needed to run, so I did it when I got home from work. I just took off from my house and ran a 7.5 mile loop and threw in a couple strides at the end. It felt pretty good.
I guess this is just a plan to get all the junk out of my system before this weekend. I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow, so I did the workout today with the Monday group. I joined a few folks for the long version of the warm-up (Riverside to Lake Austin) which was right about three miles. Today was exactly the kind of day that reinforces why I don’t like this workout at all. With the rain coming down, the ground was wet, and I was even more scared of falling than usual on the steep downhill section at the end of each lap. Thankfully Gilbert said these were for form, not time, and he actually told me to not use my watch. I know I didn’t do them very fast, but I did do five laps, followed by the usual five sprints up and three backwards. I couldn’t stick around to chat because I had a long way to go back and a meeting to get to today, too, just not as early as tomorrow. Everything felt fine. I’ll be thankful to run on flatter ground tomorrow.
This was my first “bad” run in quite a long time. I just didn’t feel right at all. I hope it was just because of the extreme cold.
The plan was to run most of the Austin Marathon course. I was going kind of easy to save my strength for the race next weekend, which was a bit difficult because the other big training group plus the marathon pacers were out practicing on this route today. I had planned to start at about 5:45, but there were so many people that I didn’t find parking and get ready to run until a little after 6:00. I started off with some other people leaving around that time, but I knew I would not stay with them for long. They were planning on marathon pace for most of the run, and I wasn’t going to go that fast. We followed another group on a little detour near the start, but once we got back to the trail we were on track.
The route was basically the marathon course but with the first five or so miles cut off. I stayed with the group for the first four miles or so, until we reached the water stop on Lake Austin Blvd. They picked up the pace there, and I was on my own plan from then on. I guess I ran pretty consistently. Most people had started earlier than I did, and I spent the next couple hours just moving up through the groups.
The cold really got to me. Every time I stopped to eat one of my gels, I ran into trouble. I had pre-cut the edges like usual, but even with that, I had trouble getting them open. I would use my teeth and still just rip off the very top. Then, once I had an opening, I could not get enough force in my hands to squeeze the stuff out. I know I lost a lot of time and energy on those.
After about eight miles or so I just didn’t feel much like continuing. My legs felt fine and all, but something just felt off. I just pressed on, though, and continued to move through the ranks. After about 15 or 16 miles, I remember thinking about how the differences between the best and worst runs are mostly mental. That was near where mile 21 in the marathon is, and that was where I had trouble last year. It’s so easy to let those demons come out and take over. So maybe this was good practice. I was going through what kinds of things I must know and remind myself of to stay on track when it gets like this.
I mostly snapped out of it when the 3:20 pacers caught me with a few miles to go, and I latched on and ran with them the rest of the way, picking it up pretty well in the last mile or so. I finished at RunTex and just didn’t feel that great. According to the stats, I was fine. Including leaving my watch running through all the water stops (and there were tons of them), I still averaged about 8 minutes per mile for well over 22 miles, and my heart rate was nice and low. Something just didn’t feel right, and I’m hoping it was just the cold. I stuck around and stretched in the cold, and that was not a lot of fun, but I’m sure it helped me.
I was traveling all this week, so I did not work out with the group. I did get some good running in, though. I meant to do about 8 miles on Monday, and I eyeballed a route, but it took me a while longer than I thought it would, so after I mapped it I found out it was really 11 miles. The highlight of that run is really only funny because I emerged mostly unharmed. I was running down a street where the sidewalks were being redone, and fortunately I found they had the right-most lane of traffic blocked off, so I ran there and was fine. However, at one point the road wasn’t blocked anymore, so I hopped up on the torn-up sidewalk area to dodge the cars. I run early in the morning, so it was really dark. To make a long story short, I was running on the dirt there and saw a great big hole just a little too late for me to stop, so I jumped as hard as I could and almost made it across. I slipped of the far side and scraped up my knees a bit, but otherwise I was fine. I got up and gave my best “I meant to do that” look and was on my way.
I didn’t have any more adventures like that the next few days, and I averaged about 9 miles for each one. All these runs are what I’d classify as medium effort. I started off slowly and picked up the pace gradually each time, and I threw in a few short bursts of speed for good measure. That all felt good, and I am confident I am ready to race hard in a week.
I meant to run a bit today, but in honor of the cold and rain I decided to just do some core exercises inside instead. I’ve got a long run to do in the morning, and I feel ready to go.
This morning I met the group for a tour of the 3M half course. Last year, this was the run where it was cold and raining really hard and we were basically swimming. Today, it was nice, though. We carpooled from downtown up to the Gateway shopping center, and soon we were off. I started off with a group that was a little faster than I could comfortably go, so at the first water stop I waited a bit and fell in with a more reasonable crew. We still moved pretty quickly, but I felt all right. It was a lot of fun. We just cruised through the course, and it went by a lot faster than I expected. Once we passed the end of the half-marathon course, we cut over to Congress to get back home. That last little bit there was super-fast. It was probably one my fastest fast finishes ever on one of these runs. I knocked out some strides and joined everyone else for balance drills and stretching. My heart rate numbers were surprisingly low considering it was a pretty strong run overall. I’ll take it!
This morning, we had what is one of the tougher workouts on the schedule for me. I guess you get out what you put in, and I guess I just run it hard. Anyway, we were doing the 2 km laps around the Zilker Soccer Fields. I felt good this morning, and I went out and started with my pre-warm-up warm-up as usual. Once the group arrived, I ran with them to Zilker Park and did the drills.
I felt pretty confident as we started. I planned to do five and pick up the pace each time. That was going well, but after four laps, everyone else stopped. Gilbert said that was plenty for me, too. I wanted to do another one and really get going fast, but that was all. I felt pretty smooth throughout the workout, and I knew I had more in me. I guess it will have to wait. My times were: 7:48, 7:29, 7:28, 7:19.
I did the cool-down run back plus a little bit of stretching, and that was it for the day. I’m satisfied with that one. It was a good workout, and I felt really good.
I was feeling pretty sick for a couple days, and I didn’t go running Tuesday because of it. I felt a lot better today, so I headed out for my easy run. I did my 0 to 5 to 0 loop again, and I felt pretty good. I wasn’t particularly fast, but that’s all right. I finished with some strides, and those felt really good. From there I went to the gym and got a pretty total body workout. I’m still pushing fluids tonight, and hopefully I’ll be all fixed by tomorrow morning so I can go run fast again.
I still wasn’t feeling too great this morning, so it was probably good that I had an easy run to myself. I did the seven mile loop plus the trip to and from the loop from Barton Springs. I didn’t go particularly fast. My legs felt all right, and my heart rate was low, but I had a hard time breathing. I went from there to the gym for a little bit, and that went well. Hopefully I’ll be feeling much better when I wake up in the morning.
This weekend we were due for another tour of the Austin Marathon course. I was a little off this time, though. The weather changed a lot over the last couple days, and I woke up feeling pretty congested. Then, when I started running, my legs felt pretty stiff, too, but I don’t know what that was from. In any case, I ran with my usual group for the first several miles of the course. It gets easier after the first couple miles, and that helped my legs loosen up. I could tell I was working too hard to make it to twenty like that, though, so when the others picked up the pace on Lake Austin Blvd I just let them go.
I felt a lot like cutting the route short, but I knew I needed to turn this into a mental toughness run. I ran by myself the rest of the way. The route we did cut across the middle of the marathon course. From 35th Street, we veered on to 38th and took that over to Avenue H before heading north to pick up the course again. I hadn’t run through that section of town before. Somewhere on 38th I had to stop for a brief coughing fit, but I felt much better after that.
Once I finished the loop up to 49th and got back to Duval I started to see people from the group again who had run shorter distances and were taking the same route home. I picked up the pace over the last few miles and had a pretty strong finish. I was actually catching the group I had lost earlier in the day. I attempted to do some strides at Auditorium Shores, but I was pretty tight and they weren’t very good. I stuck around for the stretching routine, and that was that. I’m glad I got the distance in. It was just about 20 miles. My heart rate was a little higher than I wanted, but it’ll do.