Week 6, Day 2

Brisk five-minute warmup walk, then:
Jog 1 mile (or 10 minutes)
Walk 1/4 mile (or 3 minutes)
Jog 1 mile (or 10 minutes)


Again, I'm a day behind since I only ran Tuesday and Thursday nights this week. We decided to stick with the Day 2 plan as that seems more attainable with the break in between runs.

We also decided to switch it up a bit and move back to the lake and an earlier time since it is so cool out this week. It felt great running out there with a cool breeze!

I pretty much accomplished the workout for Day 2. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what we ran by the time on the Garmin...I know when I reached the parking lot and stopped the time it was 28:14. So I'm going to talk this out here and try and figure it out. :)

We got to talking during our 5 minutes warm up walk and lost track of time a bit, so we actually walked 6 minutes instead of 5...and so that threw me off. I'm so used to running until the timer says 15 minutes now that I'm trying to get to 10 minutes before breaking, and that's what I did..then realized after we stopped that we had only ran 9 minutes because we walked an extra minute in the beginning...(Timer read 15:00 when we stopped)

We had just passed the 1 mile marker around the lake when my timer was at about 14:45. Because of the walk at the beginning, my Garmin actually showed .95 miles at that point. Lisa went on and ran to the 1 1/4 mile marker, but Mandy and I turned around there to head back and ran the last 15 seconds or so until I stopped us early at 9 minutes.

I *thought* we walked an extra minute (4 total) after that first run, but I'm almost positive the timer read 18:00 when we started running again (3 minutes). I'm not sure. I know we ran another 7 minutes, had just rounded the Corner and could see the parking lot when Mandy asked me how many minutes we had run and I said 7. That would have put us at 25:00 minutes...I don't remember what the Garmin said at that point. We both stopped there for a quick breathe....I shuffled the songs on my iPod and decided with the 'finish line' in site, I was just going to go for it, so after about 30 seconds of walking I took off again.

That last stretch didn't seem like it would be that long since I could see my car, but It ended up being at least 3 more minutes..like I mentioned above, I stopped the Garmin when I got there and it said 28:14 and 2.08 miles.

Mandy and I talked about that time/distance a bit and it didn't really seem accurate...but I'm assuming it was....If you remember back to my post about the Bennington Days race, I finished that 2 mile run in a time of 28:25....so that is what is confusing me, because I had to walk a lot of that race because my knees hurt so bad...and I definitely felt like I ran A LOT more last night then I did in that race, but the time/distance are almost identical....and that seems off.

I guess if I think about it, with the warm up walk and the break walk that is 8 or 9 minutes total walking time...so only about 20 minutes of running...I still think I walked a lot more at the race, but I'm not going to dwell on it right now.

I just feel really good about being able to run at or very close to 10 minutes without stopping. :)

One thing about the Lake is that you really do not have a good sense of distance like at the track, where your just running in a circle and you know how far you have gone....there are markers at the lake that tell how many yards (?) you've gone and then mile markers, but come on...how many of us can actually judge how far 400 yards are? Anyone? Anyone?? Not I. So having the Garmin at the Lake with the timer/distance tracker is huge.

I was also surprised at how well my knees are doing. I didn't wear any of the braces on them last night, and they are great this morning. Haven't had to ice for the last 3 runs or so...I didn't feel like I needed to, but I probably should be doing it anyway just in case.

Trying to keep a steady pace was a bit harder for me as well at the lake...I felt like I was going too fast right off the bat and my sides were both cramping up pretty early on...but I'm sure that had a lot to do with the fact that there were some pretty decent inclines on the path we were running...and it probably didn't help that I had a bowl of fettuccine alfredo for dinner either...but I did eat a small portion...didn't want to be hurling that up while running. :)

I'm hoping that while it's cool this next week, we'll stick to the lake. That will get us used to running on the pavement again and pretty much the exact same conditions as we will be running the 5k in August in. I wish the weather would stay in the high 70's, low 80's until that race, but who am I kidding. We've literally been breaking record lows for temps here over the last few days, so I'm expecting to have god awful record high temps by the time the race gets here! But hopefully before that happens I'll have a decent running time down.

Next week I think my focus will be on watching my mile time and seeing if I can keep that consistant. I'm thinking that I'll have Lisa time our first 5 minute walk, and then I won't start my Garmin until we actually run...that way the time/distance is calculated by running and not the walks too.

Week 6, Day 1

But I ran Day 2's workout. Because I skipped Day 1's workout. Because I wanted to catch up to Lisa and Mandy. Understand? Good. :)

This is Day 1's Workout:

Brisk five-minute warm up walk, then:
Jog 1/2 mile (or 5 minutes)
Walk 1/4 mile (or 3 minutes)
Jog 3/4 mile (or 8 minutes)
Walk 1/4 mile (or 3 minutes)
Jog 1/2 mile (or 5 minutes)

And this is what I actually ran...sorta. :)

Brisk five-minute warm up walk, then:
Jog 1 mile (or 10 minutes)
Walk 1/4 mile (or 3 minutes)
Jog 1 mile (or 10 minutes)

It was hella hot last night. Probably the hottest, most humid night we've ever ran, or can remember running. It was still close to 90 degrees when we started at 9:00 p.m. And that sucked.

I was prepared to totally crap out fast since A - it was hot, and B - I skipped Sundays run so I hadn't ran since last Thursday...and I was feeling pretty lazy about that.

BUT, much to my surprise, option B above might have actually helped me this time around. I'll chalk it up to being well rested and no knee pain, but those first 10 minutes running seemed to go by pretty fast. I tried not to look at my watch too much, mostly because it was too dark out to see it, plus I had the iPod charged up this time so it didn't die on me after the first song. I think the music helped keep my mind off of the time.

The second 10 minute run was considerably harder and that had everything to do with the heat. After about 4 minutes I just felt like I could not control my breathing or catch my breath so I stopped right there. Had the weather been cooler, I think I might have been able to make it. But I'm not positive.

We're actually having a 'cold wave' this week. I don't' think it's even going to get up to 80 on Thursday, so that will be a bonus. Our plan (Mandy and I...Lisa is a running queen right now) is to try and just do the same run Thursday as we did last night. Break it up into two 10 minute runs with a small break in between instead of 25 straight minutes.

We figure we have the time to work up to the long runs. We have exactly 1 month from today until our race, and will be done with this program by then. It will give us another week or so to try and attempt the longer runs. Plus this week is the last week of any type of runs with breaks in them. Week 7 - 9 has you running the same work out each day, 25, 28 & 30 minute runs for the last three weeks.

At this point, that will be a challenge. But one I'm looking forward too