"It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves"

I went out today with a goal of running for 45 continuous minutes after the disaster that was yesterday's long run.  So I've been reading up on McMillan Running.com and the guy uses Jack Daniel's Running Formula to calculate the proper pace that you should run to train  The online calculator says to keep my pace between 8:06 and 8:36 for easy runs.  

 For my run, I started out from my house and headed down around Snow Canyon High and meandered around  the trails before heading back home. I got home at 44:07 and called it good enough.  My presence was required in the water closet, if you know what I mean.

 I felt pretty good most of the time and managed to maintain an average pace of 8:16. Although it felt good, I sure felt like I was holding back and going extremely slow. Ha ha, there was one point though when I got on the trailhead by Snow Canyon and another lady came from Little League Drive right behind me.  I thought she might pass me, (yeah right I think now) but it bugged me to have some random person's footsteps right behind me so I let go and pushed 6:00-6:30 for 400-800 metres.  Not a good idea. I had to really start pushing then just to keep going at my pace. Oh well, it felt great while I was doing it.

 Got home and worked out on the Bowflex for 45 minutes or so. Great for toning, but not so much for gaining muscle mass.  But, it is better than nothing, I suppose.

 Oh hey, and if anybody knows how to get Five Finger shoes for less than $90, please let me know.  That's way too much for a novelty shoe if you ask me. 

I set out today with the goal of 8-10 miles.  I ran from my house up to Castle Rock (aka Death Mountain) and back.  Overall it was a pretty good run. My dad had the GPS so I had to guesstimate my pace and such and I'm pretty sure I averaged around 8:30 or so for the first 9 miles.  The last mile was after a short break and it was more of a walk/run cool-down. Overall, it took ~1:20.  I really need to work on my endurance if I'm going to get under 3:10 in the marathon.  Right now I think that 3:20-3:30 is a more realistic time for my fitness level.

Anyway,  I'm happy with myself so far this week. 

Today was a nice, easy, slow, recovery run.  McMillian's calculator says I should be running just over 9:00 per mile for recovery, but I had a hard time going that slow.  It was an ok run.  Not much more than I expected because I went to the 9:20 showing of Hellboy last night. I only slept from 12:00-5:40.  I've increased my miles already this week and I'm pretty happy about that.

 Worked out my legs and the bowflex today. That went pretty well and I watched a good episode of the X-Files.  I need to get a treadmill so I can force myself to run or at least walk on bad days. And I can entertain myself with more pirated tv shows.

Oh, and I worked for six hours.  I work at Stadium 8 and working the matinee shows is horrible.  We really have nowhere to go and sit down, and no work to do. So I basically get paid to stand around for 5 hours and work for an hour.  At least I get free movie tickets...

Well, I guess some good things have to come to an end.  I've been pushing myself pretty hard this week and really increasing my miles.  I felt like I needed to throw some speedwork in for today's workout and it didn't work out so well.  I chose to do 2 mile repeats and I only ran one continuous mile.  Perhaps I was pushing it too hard, or I am just feeling fatigue from running earlier this week. 

The first repeat felt so-so. I ran out to where my GPS said 1 mile, turned around and ran back home.  I even started to speed up and was excited with my performance. Until I got home.  Oops. I forgot that I had part of my warm-up on my watch and I actually only did 1.3 miles instead of two. Great workout, eh? It was at 5:43 pace though.  Would have been right on if I could've maintained it for two miles. Took a break and set out for the next one and barely made it a quarter of a mile before my heart started pounding and I just stopped. Walked a bit and thought over what I should do and decided to switch to a Fartlek. Tried doing that, and same results. So I ended up walking/running a bit before heading home.

 I'm starting to wear an ace bandage on my right shin for the better part of the day now.  I always get shin splints when I start increasing my miles

I'm still planning on that 15 mile run on Saturday. But I'm working tonight and tomorrow from 5:30-1:00am. We'll just have to see how that turns out.