A tale of several runs

I have to apologize for not having updated this in several weeks - with Christmas and a new semester of school starting it's been a bit busy around here, but I have managed to keep the exercise going. I've missed a few exercise sessions, but none of the runs, so I think I'm in pretty good position as we draw closer to the March 19th marathon. I won't try to recap everything, but I did have a few run sessions that seemed to merit comment. 

Running during Snowmageddon

A week ago we got what passes for a big storm around here. Here in Hillsborough we got something like 4-5 inches of snow, but the first inch was a layer of solid ice covering the roads. I had a grand time sledding down our hill with my daughter, but it made for a difficult time getting anywhere in a car. I ended up not trying to do my long run that weekend, but did get out on Monday and ran 5 miles. I created another pair of my patented "snow shoes" by screwing a bunch of 3/8" long hex-head screws into the soles of some old running shoes, which gave me plenty of traction.

The Davis Farm (on Davis Rd.)

Is this a hill or a cliff?

Thursday I ran by work with KT, who is now not only running her first 10K in April but has signed up for a half-marathon down at Disneyworld in November. We did a 6-mile loop that is mostly downhill for the first 4 or so miles, and has a nasty uphill section at the end. The picture below is the elevation profile as captured by my phone. I' ran the NCRC Classic half-marathon last year and the upward section shown below is the finish of that race, which is pretty challenging when you've already run 12 miles to get to that point.




Good long run on Saturday

This past week was a recovery week, so I was only supposed to run 6 miles over the weekend. However, given that I didn't do a long run the previous weekend I figured it was better to do that run this weekend so that I'm mostly caught up. Amanda can let me know if I guessed wrong on that!
The weather on Saturday was really good for a long run - mostly cloudy, little wind, and a pretty constant temperature in the mid-40s. I'm going to miss this weather when I'm training in August.
I had a much faster run than I did the previous time I ran this same 12-mile course, and it was also faster than my half-marathon times from last year. The NCRC race mentioned above took me 2:31:55, or roughly an 11:35/mile pace. This run was at a 10:51/mile pace and the whole thing took me 2:10:10, meaning that I'd have set a PR on the half-marathon as long as I could cover that last 1.1 miles in under 20 minutes. I was slowing down, but not that much!
My times were pretty consistent.

Keeping in mind that I'm still doing a program where I run for 6 minutes and then walk for 1, my pace means that I cover roughly 0.55 miles for each run leg and probably 0.05 for the walk portion, or 6/10ths of a mile per cycle. This means that I alternate between having one and two walk breaks per elapsed mile, which makes the times bounce around a bit, but looking at the graph of my entire pace I was pretty consistent.

I'll see if I can keep the updates more frequent so that they aren't so long going forward. Thanks for reading!

 

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