6 Days Straight and Going Strong!

So, now that I'm getting accustomed to my new found life, that is the rebirth after the coffee store, I'm finding that I am being MUCH more consistent about my running. Back when I owned the store, I would basically have something to do virtually every single day with the store. Whether that was going to the bank 3 times a week, making the Costco runs twice a week, or working in the store twice a week, it was always such a burden. Add into that the engineering carreer, I was probably putting in close to 80-90 hours per week, working.....

I guess they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And that's for SURE the case right now, because unloading the day to day stress of owning your own business, I've re-found my love of running, and as the title states, I've run 6 straight days!!!! BOO YAH! Now, that's an amazing accomplishment in itself. Today's run was with a running partner in my group. Yesterday, Paul and I made the commitment to meet each other at 5am so that we could get in 5 miles at a nice relaxing pace. What was supposed to be relaxing, turned out to be a great run. When you out there with someone else, especially someone who has very similar goals as you, you find out what is actually a very comfortable pace where you can still converse back and forth. Never in my mind would I have thought that pace would have been what we ran. At one point, at the start of therun, we both decided that the pace was too fast and we should throttle it back a bit, which we did. But that didn't actually last very long when analyzing Dr. Garmin after I got home. What I didn't realize, is that we ran that 5.68 miles, in basically 51 minutes. WAY FASTER than I think either one of us had intended. But you get lost in the run. We had great conversations about our goals, etc. We're both in a very similar position. About 8 weeks ago, I weighed in at 205 pounds. Today, after changing my diet over to the Nutrisystems plan, I'm sitting pretty at 185. Paul is in a very similar situation. He popped up over 200, and just recently started his own plan, and is starting to see the results. We both have goals of sustaining longer distance runs at a faster pace. My ultimate goal, as I stated in one of the other blogs was to run my slow days at 8:30, and my speed days in 6:54ish. I'll tell you right now, today, we averaged a 9 minute pace, with a couple in there at the upper 8:40s.

The fact is that it's 90% mental. We had no idea we were going that fast, we were lost in the conversation. We weren't pushing hard, we were just out there cruising. And it was great. We even talked about how roughly three weeks ago, we were on a Saturday morning group run, when I had uncharateristically passed Paul....So much, to where I had a pretty big gap behind us...That was until the last set when I started to hear him coming on. He didn't want to finish behind me, I didn't want him to pass me, and we literrally ended up in an all out sprint for the last minute, finshing stride for stride. Would we have put out the effort running by ourselves. NO WAY. But it's moments like these when finding a running partner with similar goals really pays off!! So, if you can find someone with similar goals, I highly reccomend making that commitment to helping better yourselves. It will pay off, and I'm already seeing the results!

Train hard, and LIVESTRONG!!!

What a GREAT Weekend of Running

This post is LONG overdue, as it's been several days since my last run. I got a GREAT weekend of quality running in, and I have to say I feel GREAT! Saturdays workout was a 30 minute tempo. The course is very familiar, as I've run it hundreds of times. I wanted to use it as a gauge to see where is my fitness for now. My goal was to see how close to 4 miles I could get in that time. I didn't expect to get there, but I needed some kind of baseline since this was the start of marathon training week #1. So, meeting a relatively small group (since there was a race on Sunday), us non racers toed the line at 5:30 on a beautiful Saturday morning. Knowing my goal, I ended up a little farther then where I thought I would at 3.85 miles according to Dr. Garmin. And the beauty, I checked my pace at each mile reminder, and I was always around 7:45....Which, if you calculate the final pace, it's right at 7:45. Nice and consistent. Where do I want to be?? I want to get that down to somewhere between 7:00 and 7:15. That's VERY doable where I'm at right now by race day in mid January. Some of that will come with weight loss. Right now at 186, I'm about 15-20 pounds over where I want to be race day. I would like to be somewhere around 165-170 by then. As the miles increase, the weight will come off. It has to. It won't have anywhere else to go. So, if I lose another 15 pounds (low side), that's going to equate to almost 30 seconds per mile. That gets me right at the low end of where I want to be race day! And the beauty is, I have 4.5 months to get there. That's less then a pound of weight loss per week. VERY VERY DOABLE....and yes....I have the weight to lose.

Sunday was also another great day to run. I don't set a target time, I just like to go out and run, and finish when I feel done. So, out the door I headed at about 7:15. I also take it easy, like a 9:30 pace, with planned water breaks along the way. I managed to get in 7.5 miles and ran for a total of about 1:10 minutes. I was actually gone a total of 1:20, but that 10 mins is par tof my planned water stops. No need to hurry, just take it easy and put the miles on the feet.

Monday, I woke up before my alarm clock which was very very unusual. I wasn't feeling 100%, so I just wanted to take it very easy, and get at least 20 mins in. I managed to get that done. No break neck pace, just a 1 mile out and a one mile back course. Nothing to brag about, that's for sure, but it definitley made a difference in how the legs felt today.

Today's run was a group workout. It's always fun to find out (after you've started) that you're doing a shorter workout then you had mentally planned for. I came in thinking we were doing 16x1/4 mile. I misread the schedule. And thankfully it was 16x1 min. Very nice mental recovery there. And I ran very well.....My first set started off very slowly. I think we ran it at like an 8 min/mile pace. I'll have to go back and look at Dr. Garmin to verify that, but it was almost conversational. I definitely managed to pick up the pace as we went along, and by the end, I was really trying to hang with one of the the faster runners of the group after he passed me. I can thankfully say, he didn't actually gain much distance on me after he made the pass. So it was a GREAT motivator to hang with him on the last 3 sets.

I also plan on meeting with Paul tomorrow morning to get 5 miles in on the big loop. we can take it fairly pedestrian, and still get done with enough time to make my 6am telecon!

Until then, LIVESTRONG and TRAIN HARD!