all the latest

Well, I haven't posted in a while and I have a lot to say! Last Saturday (the 7th) I went on a 12.5 miler--safe to say, it's the longest run I've ever attempted in my life (pretty much every long run from here on out will be exactly that...). So I ALMOST did a half-marathon. And man. It was HARD. All my long runs up to this point haven't been too bad--they've been tiring, sure, but not too difficult. This run was TOUGH. At about mile 8 or 9 I realized I still had 4 miles to go or so, and it was a depressing thought. I was seriously considering taking a shorter way home and making it an 11 mile run or so, but finally decided to push through to the end. I'm really glad I did, even though it was hard--knowing that I had run my total planned distance felt good, and even thought I was exhausted there was no lasting damage that I could see at the end of the run :-). I did the whole run in just under two hours (about 112 minutes). I'm sticking with the run 9 minutes walk 1 for my longer runs, and I think that in conjunction with my new shoes seemed to do wonders for my knees--hardly any knee pain at all. Knee soreness (there wasn't a part of my body that WASN'T sore afterwards...), yes, but no knee pain. I'll take that as a good sign.

Here's the map of the 12.5 miler:

On Monday (9th) I did another mile time trial and got 6:04--I'm slowly creeping up on my goal of a sub six-minute mile, which I don't even think I was running in high school (I was more of a sprinter in high school and I think my fastest mile was slightly over 6 minutes, 6:10 or something). So it feels good to be making progress there as well. The first few weeks I was doing mile time trials I was shaving my time down by a few seconds each week, but lately it is getting harder and harder to slice those seconds off, my times don't go down quite so steadily anymore, I'll get 6:08 one week and then 6:10 the next and then 6:04 the next week...but I think, overall, they are still going down. I'd like to get a sub six minute mile by the end of the year...! We'll see.

I'm doing other things to increase my speed as well, including running sets of 1-mile intervals every other weekend or so (alternating weeks with my long runs). I'd also like to add a hill/stair workout sometime during the week as well, depending on how my body is feeling.

Other than that my basic weekday workout is a little over 7 miles, I'm running it at about 54 minutes these days. I'd like to shave that down to 52 minutes before I increase my weekday workouts to 8 miles.

Yesterday (Saturday the 14th) I did another interval workout, which went great...except for the weather. I was planning on a colder run (mid-to-high-thirties), which I've run in recently so I wasn't to worried about it. But before I had even finished my warm-up mile, barely 6 minutes into my run, it starts SNOWING like the dickens! I wasn't that cold so I decided to press on and ran my first interval mile. Sometime during that first mile the snow started coming down with a vengeance, cutting into my eyeballs and plastering to my beard scruff. Unfortunately it was just warm enough for the snow to melt right into my clothes (and I didn't wear anything waterproof, only two long-sleeve wicking shirts, running gloves, a hat, and shorts)--so that combined with the wind made for a pretty chilled first mile. Luckily I do my intervals on a 1-mile stretch of the Provo River trail, and the trail goes under a bridge at both ends of the mile so I was able to find some shelter while I recovered from each mile interval. I did 3 full-out miles, all between 6:30 to 6:55 minutes, and a warm-up mile and a cool-down mile (it's about 0.9 miles from my house to the trail). But it was FREEZING. I was so mad at myself the whole time for not thinking about whether it would snow or not, but I didn't want to cut my run short so I pushed on (although I WAS planning on doing 4 mile-intervals...). It was funny, I was actually the coldest while I was running because of the precipitation and wind, and when I stopped running (esp. in my "shelters) I got warmed back up pretty quickly from body heat and just getting out of the elements. I'm used to dealing with the opposite--being warmest while I'm running, and being cooler when I take a break or finish the run. Anyway, I have to say it was probably the most uncomfortable run I've ever done. But I did it, and I learned my lesson (I think).

So, there's all my updates. I'm planning on another mile time trial tomorrow, and another long run this Saturday! 14-15 miles...mizica.