Five and a Bit

Five miles is about the limit of Monument Valley Park without a lot of back tracking. Next week, I’ll have to start venturing down to America the Beautiful Park to make the mileage. The park is a pretty place to run, and the sunny weather had lured far more people out than last week’s cloudy, chilly morning did.

There’s not much to talk about. I got down to the park and just went about the business of putting in the miles. With about 2 miles left to go, I made a “fun goal” of trying to keep my average pace below 13 min/mile.

I have this weird thing about wanting to finish my runs where I started, and as I passed that point this morning, I was at 4.97 miles… I decided to do another lap of Boddington Field to prove to my mind that I wasn’t as bushed as it was telling me I was.

Today’s Stats: Minimum – 5 miles
5.5 miles
1:10:45 h:m:s
12:50 avg pace

Total miles trained: 15.16

Route

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Ugh…

I woke up this morning knowing I didn’t want to run.

I’ve been riding my bike to work on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays — so my legs were tired. I didn’t sleep well, so I’m tired. I just didn’t feel like it this morning, so when I forced myself out the door to go change, I figured I’d do the minimum. I won’t write up a run that’s under 2 miles (so the Nielsons count), so that’s my floor. I opted to run on the road for the first half of the run since the half will be on both hard surfaces as well as the trails I usually run.

I got out there. I did it. It wasn’t pretty. And it was just barely, slightly, marginally over the minimum. But I did it.

Today’s Stats: Minimum – 2 miles
2.38 miles
29:09 m:s
12:15 avg pace

Total miles trained: 9.66

Route

How Far Can I Go?

Right now, I don’t really know how far I can go on my weekday runs. The time I allotted (which can be adjusted) gives me only 75 minutes to get over to the gym, change, run, shower, change, return to work. And today I had a meeting, so getting back on time was paramount. When I was running in the park in Denver, it took a while to figure out which routes would give me good distances. Even though I’m much more familiar with this park — where I work is very close to the south end of Monument Valley Park where I’ve done all my distance runs for last year’s 10K — I don’t know how far things are.

So I’m working at that incrementally. Today’s goal was: Uintah and Back. Uintah’s one of the major streets in Colorado Springs and the trail goes under Uintah. Conveniently, there’s a trail on both sides of the river, so my plan was to do a big loop. In last week’s pilot run, I stuck to the south end of the park, and did a couple of loops around there. I think today’s goal looked like a good candidate for testing distances and figuring how far I can go, and how much time it’s going to take to do these runs.

Today’s Stats: Minimum – N/A
2.97 miles
36:19 m:s
12:13 avg pace

Total miles trained: 7.28

The Route

Half-Marathon Training — Baseline

The overcast and cloudy gray sky sort of matched my levels of enthusiasm this morning. September seems so far away at the moment, but it’ll be here sooner than expected. And I will finish this half marathon I signed up for.

And you all know — since you’ve experienced the same thing — my mood didn’t stay gloomy. Once I got started and warmed up, even though I wouldn’t say I enjoyed all of it, I did enjoy most of the run.

I didn’t have a set goal in mind other than to set a base from which to begin training, but I figured 4 miles seemed like a perfect starting point. My plan is to add a mile every week until I get to 28 September. That’s 14 weeks or so, which leaves me some wiggle room.

Today’s Stats: Minimum – 4 miles
4.31 miles
52:35 m:s
12:11 avg pace

My Route

Who Is That Guy?

“I remember this fat guy had a blog he talked about running on. He must’ve died or something because he sort of disappeared. He probably got run over by a cyclist.”

Well, I had no expectations today. I am still settling into the new job, but my last Nielson Challenge was a bit of a wake up call for me. September is only a few months away, and I’ve done literally nothing about the half-marathon. Well, aside from sign up for it — you know, the easy part. Especially when it’s a year away and there’s plenty of time to train for it.

I headed out for a short blast to see what I could get done in the time I allotted myself. It wasn’t much, but I didn’t give myself a lot of time to work with. There was a jerk on the road when I left my apartment this morning; his driving was so angrily aggressive, I opted to go the other direction. So that cut a little into my running time since it basically doubled my trip time… (But come on, doubling a 7 minute drive time/5 mile drive still wins over what I was doing before).

Anyway, I got a couple of miles in. So I’m happy with it. It’s a starting point. Improvements to come, right?

Today’s Stats:
2.72 miles
32:09 m:s
11:49 avg. pace

June 2019 — Nielson Challenge Result

I learned little. After not preparing for the Run to the Shrine, I continued not preparing for this month’s Nielson Challenge.

I have a half marathon scheduled in September, I have to get out of the rut of not preparing.

But the weather was gorgeous today.

Today’s Stats:
2 miles
21:42.010 m:s.hhh

2019 Run to the Shrine

Well, considering I didn’t do much prep, I’m not too disappointed with my time: 53:32

It was a beautiful day for it. I didn’t really try too hard to run the whole uphill, even though that was one of my stated goals. I knew I hadn’t really done much preparation. I did enjoy the views on the way up.

The timing system sent me this:

Here are your results for the 2019 Run to the Shrine:
Your final time is 00:53:32 at a 00:13:23 pace.
You finished 438 out of 1350 runners.
You finished 24 out of 45 in your class M40-44.

So, as you can see, today’s stats:
4 miles
53:32 m:s
13:23 avg. pace

My TomTom listed it as ~1400 ft (426.72m) of elevation gain.