Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Happy 4th

My run tonight was by far the coolest run I have ever done. I took off at dusk just as most people were starting to light off their fireworks. So for 35 minutes I got to see all kinds of fireworks going off and lots of people out enjoying them. So I just took things easy and enjoyed the shows. There was a big show put on by the Country Club that I got to watch for the last mile of the too.

One of the neighborhoods I run though had lots of people outside with a bunch of chairs setup. There was a light on the sidewalk near them I thought it was the glowing remains of a sparkler or something but it was actually an extension cord. Just as I was running by a guy picked up a box that was attached to it that had a bunch of switches on it. As I ran a little farther I figured out what was going on. There was little clearing that had all kinds of fireworks setup so the box must have controlled them. Sure enough, later in my run there was all kinds of neat stuff lighting up the sky from that area. I wonder what it would cost to get something like that setup and how to do it.

Because tonight run was so awesome I think I'm going to have to make it some sort of tradition to go for a run on the fourth and enjoy everyone lighting off their fireworks. I can just do that instead of buying any of my own and save a bunch of money. Of course I won't be able to go for a run when we can make to the fourth party that we usually attend.

I hope everyone else had a safe a fun fourth and that no one lost more than two fingers.

Monday, July 2, 2007

Week in Review

Since my training for the week is going to be pretty boring for the rest of the year. I think I'll just post a summary of the previous week every Sunday or Monday. So here is my summary of last week's (6/25 - 7/1) workouts. It might be worth mentioning that if for the training program my week starts on Mondays.

Monday - Rest
Tuesday - 1.5 miles in 15:23 (10:16 per mile) with an average heart rate of 139.
Wednesday - 3 miles in 33:04 (10:34 per mile) average HR 141.
Thursday - Watched a bunch of crap on T.V. instead of running
Friday - should have rested but had to run since I didn't on Thursday. 2 miles in 22:10 (11:05 per mile) average HR of 144.
Saturday - 4 miles in 42:00 (10:29 per mile) average HR of 142.
Sunday - played a round of disc golf with Amy.

During my runs I listened to book the first, 'The Bad Beginning', of 'A Series of Unfortunate Events'. The book was pretty good, but it will probably be quite awhile, if ever, before I listen to another one of those books. I started listening 'Tuesdays with Morrie' on Saturdays run. So far I like that book a lot and I'll probably read it sometime, listening to it just isn't the same. All of my runs went pretty well, except I had a slight pain in my knee during Friday's run. I iced it after and it didn't bother me at all on Saturday.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

New Training Plan

For the rest of the year I'm going to be training to build my aerobic base. I've posted on that before here. In order for the training to be the most effective I'm not going to be doing any anaerobic workout, with means no speed work and no races. At least that's the plan, if I start to lose motivation or get bored I'll probably have to change that plan.

I'm going to use Hal Higdon's Novice Supreme training plan. It is a 30 week plan that is designed to get someone ready for their first marathon, but I'm just using it to build up my weekly mileage slowly. I actually started on week 4 of the program because of the mileage I've done the past few weeks. If you look at the plan you'll see that there are a lot of 3 miles runs (36 of the 96 total runs). So I'm going to have to find quite a few different 3 mile runs around here to keep things interesting. So if all goes well I'll be running over 30 miles a week toward the end of the year.

For all of these runs my goal will be to keep my heart rate under 150. So far this means that I have to walk up a lot of hills during the second half of my runs. I try to run slow enough to keep my HR down, but if it doesn't work I switch to walking, usually my pace picks up at then though (but my heart rate stays down). My average for the first 8 runs where I kept my HR under 150, an average of 140, I ran a pace of 11:40 per mile. The six runs since then had an average pace of 10:30 per mile and an average HR of 143. So my time seems to be coming down pretty quickly so far. I'm anxious to see what kind of pace I'm running at the same heart rate by the end of the year.

The reason that I'm training like this is because I've decided to run the Lincoln Marathon next May. I figure I'll be 26 then so what better reason to run 26 miles? I'm planning on following an 18 week training plan so this training will take me pretty much right up to the start of that. My base should be built up enough to be able to do the tempo runs and speed work that I'll need to.

One of my coworkers said he is going to plan on running it with me. He has ran a few marathons before so it will be nice to have an experienced runner as a reference. I probably won't run with him much though, he lives in Utah and is just here in Kearney during the week. He is just a consultant too and I'm not sure how much longer he'll be working with us, but the internet makes the world a pretty small place. I like the idea of training with people, even if we don't actually run together, so anyone else want to plan on running it with us?

It's been awhile

Man, it's been over a week since I last posted (so this post is going to be a little long). Let's what kind of excuse can I make up? Well my power cord for my laptop went bad (again) so I couldn't really use it all week. So I'll go with that. (We'll ignore the fact that Amy has a laptop and I brought my work laptop home every night.) The real reason is probably that I watched T.V. all week instead of doing anything productive. But I have a new AC adapter and I'm tired of watching T.V. so everything should be back to normal.

I hate T.V. There are a few shows that I enjoy watching but the other 99% of stuff that's on is crap. I hate planning my life around some show. So instead of doing that I try to avoid watching T.V. at all, then I don't have to worry about it. It's such a waste of time watching T.V., I think it's one of the reasons there are so many things wrong with our country. I'm not going to get into that at all though. So instead of wasting time watching T.V. I read all kinds of useless stuff on the internet, but at least I feel like I'm learning something.

Amy told me that she thinks I sound "irritated" in my posts (ranting about how much T.V. sucks probably won't change that). It bothered me a little when she told me because I consider myself a pretty content guy. I have no idea why I do, because that clearly isn't the case. When I was out running yesterday I think I kind of figured it out though. I'm pretty good at ranting (and really, I enjoy it) so that's what I do. I'm not real good at talking about positive things and I have no idea why. Let's take my job for example. If you ask most people that no me, they will say that I don't like my job. And they have no reason to think otherwise I complain about it more than anything. While I do have plenty to complain about (like co-workers that are a little over sensitive to having the sugar they put in their coffee replaced with salt), I really do like my job. My co-workers are great and I like 90% of the work that I do. I work for a good company that is growing fast. While there are some growing pains, I'd rather be in that situation then the opposite. So I'm going to work on focusing more on the positive than the negative (but don't worry, I'll get my rants in, I have way too many to hold them all back).

I'll start by going back to my race from last week. In my last post I was very disappointed with how it went. But I shouldn't be so hard on myself. I did take five and a half minutes off of my previous 5k time and ran my fastest mile since I started running again. I know every race can't go perfect so I'll just have to take what I can get and 5:30 off my PR is awesome. I wasn't too happy about how I finished either, even though I don't have any exact numbers. But I was measuring that against how I've done in the Lincoln races. There is a big factor that I hadn't considered before. All the races I've done in Lincoln have had two races going on at the same time and for the most part the better runners were in the race that I wasn't doing. This race only had the 5k so everyone did it. So there were a lot of runners that would have been doing the other race that beat me in this one.

The Kearney Community Olympics where a great time and I'm looking forward to next year. I want to talk about how I did pretty bad at everything I did, but I won't since I'm being positive and stuff. I'll give a quick summary of how each of the things I did went. Ti Chi was a little different, it wasn't nearly as intense as I expected it to be (but I just pulled that expectation out of thin air). Next we played Pickle-Ball. That was pretty fun, it's kind of like badminton except with oversized ping-pong paddles and a whiffle ball. We won our first game, but then we played a team that had a guy that knew what he was doing and they crushed us 11-0.

We had the 5k Saturday morning (I think I've talked about that enough). I also played some inner-tube water polo. That was a good time, and I'm sure it was plenty entertaining for those watching. I had a little trouble getting onto the inner-tube, but not as much as one of the girls on our team. I think she tried seven or eight times before giving up. It sure was a different group of muscles that I used, and I felt it for a couple days. We got beat pretty bad, 6-0 I think. But it was fun and that's all that matters. Then I shot 25 free throws. That didn't go good at all, I couldn't even make half of them. But that's the first time I've touched a ball since March (and that was the first time in a year) so I didn't expect it to be much different. I used to play on a team with the guy that won, he made 23 out of the 25. So congrats Mucklo. Then we played softball. We won our first game, actually we mercy ruled them. Our second game didn't go quite as well though. The other team pretty much got a base hit every time. Since you pitch to your own team there really wasn't anything we could do about it.

Amy played volleyball Sunday, she had fun but they only got to play one game because they got beat. I played a round of disc golf and that was a lot of fun. I'm going to start playing it more often, I played today in fact. There where a lot of other events that neither of us took part in that sounded like people had lots of fun with. Things like dancing, an Iron Chef cook off and kayaking. There was also tug-o-war and an obstacle course and it looked like everyone had fun with those. After all the events were done there was a BBQ and award ceremony. The top three finishers in each event got little medals which was pretty cool. Our team got 12 out of the 29 teams, but we were third out of the workplace teams. So we got a little plaque for that.

Since this post is so long already I'll post about my running in another post because I have a lot to write about for that too.