Monday, June 4, 2012

Training May 21 - May 27

Monday, May 21: GEHC Trails – 8 miles – Standard morning eight miler. Nothing special, my legs are still a little beat up from Saturday’s race but they are starting to come back around.

PM Run – GEHC Trails – 3 miles – Homesite loop up to Creekside, along Cherokee then back down sweet gum for an afternoon three. It’s starting to get hot. I feel like I’ve said that a bunch, but the temps are creeping up into the high 80s in the afternoon and I don’t think we’re too far from hitting the 90s on a regular basis.

Tuesday, May 22: GEHC Trails - 8 miles – I had a workout planned for this afternoon, but since everyone I’ve planned for the last couple weeks has been shot down by work or something else I wanted to make sure I got a decent run in the morning, so I ran my normal eight. That way if I get kept late or have a random golf outing I’m not scrambling to try and get something in later in the day.

PM Run – GEHC Trails – 7 miles – Forgot to pack shorts, so my initial plan of running at Gainesville state got shot down. I figured I would just head home and run another eight with some pickups, but I was a little more tired than I expected. Thunderstorms rolling in late in the afternoon forced me to cut the run a little bit short. I didn’t want to get caught 10 or 15 minutes out when the heavy stuff came in. Good call, I went to add on a couple loops of the homesite trail and BOOM! Thunder, lighting and torrential downpours by the time I crossed the wooden bridge behind my apartment. I made a mad dash for the breezeway and called it a day. 15 total miles on the day…I’ll take it.

Wednesday, May 23: GEHC Trails – 8 miles – SSDD once again. Nothing exciting to report, ran my normal morning run up the homesite trail up and around the GEHC then down to the greenway, out and back. Just one run today.

Thursday, May 24: GEHC Trails – 8 miles – I’ve had to grab my ipod shuffle for some of these morning runs lately. I’m not a huge fan of running with music but when you run the same eight miler pretty much every day (at least every weekday) sometimes I need the music to carry me through it. That reminds me I need to look into adding some new music to my shuffle (which is affectionately known as iRun by my computer…clever, I know). This got me thinking about the fact that pretty much every song ever is available to me online now and how kids now will never have a stereo with a tape deck that they use to record songs off of the radio, they’re so spoiled.

PM Run – GEHC Trails – 3 miles – Looped the environmental center after work. Nice little afternoon shake out. I really may be an over grown 12 year old…lately I have been climbing the entire little kids treetop adventure course during my afternoon runs. Amanda told me I need to stop before I get us banned for life.

Friday, May 25: GEHC Trails – 8 miles – Standard morning eight. I took it a little easier as I’m still debating running the Mountain Goat 10 miler tomorrow. The last race I did in the series was a good one so I figure I might as well jump in, after all I can’t run worse than last week (Foreshadowing??? Maybe).

Saturday, May 26: Mountain Goat Sutallee Trace Challenge – 14 miles – Mitch and I both went back and forth about doing this race after he told me a the trails are pretty tough, but I figured if I could handle it. In retrospect, Mitch had the right idea by staying home (in fairness he was dealing with some upper respiratory issues). Friday night I decided to make the drive out to Canton to run the race, figuring I’d hit up Nitro and play paintball afterwards and it would be a good day of being outside and running around.

The race was pretty heinous. I ended up taking second but the times were complete garbage. I was 1:11 and change with the winning coming in at 1:09. Looking at the times from last year I knew it was going to be slow but I thought I’d at least be under 70 minutes. I got out well and separated myself and the eventual winner pretty early and we battled over the first five or six miles before he eventually passed me on one of the many climbs around seven miles. At that point, I ran up the white flag and pretty much jogged in the last three miles. It was a miserable experience in very sense of the word, just nonstop up and down. One huge hill around half way (that I actually ran well) and then down one hill to a creek and back up the other side. It didn’t help that it was about 95 degree and humid. At the 8 mile aid station I made the decision to go straight home and park on the couch once the death march ended. Warmed up two and cooled down two to get 14 on the day.

One thing I learned from this is I can’t do these long races without getting a long run in and without doing at least a 30-60-90 workout.

Sunday, May 27: GEHC Trails – 8 miles – I was totally hosed from yesterday. I decided to stay home and run the backyard eight instead of trying to drive somewhere and have another disaster of a run like a couple weeks ago at Harbins. Drove down to Dosser Works in the city to play paintball for a couple hours after then parked on the couch and waited for Amanda to get out of work.

Weekly Totals: 75 miles on 10 runs – Much better week. I’m really pumped to get up into the 70s this week. It still feels like a lot of runs to get there, but I’ve accepted the fact that the way my schedule is running 8 in the morning and 3/5 in the afternoon is the best way for me to get my miles in. The morning runs help tremendously during the times when I have unexpected late days at work or when we’ve got a lot going on and I just don’t have the legs or time to get more than 25 minutes in after work. I am looking to build on this and try to stay in the 70s during June. I will bring my miles back down during July, August will be a wash because of training camp, but I should at least be able to pick things back up with maintenance runs by September, but that’s getting a little ahead of myself.

Maybe a road race next weekend…

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