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August 23, 2004
On the Road Again
I am composing this entry as I sit on an airplane on my way to Newark, New Jersey. Woo hoo! At this rate I should get Premier status on United in four to five weeks. That is kind of exciting. I woke up at 5:30 this morning, ran an easy four miles, took a shower, and drove to the airport. I definitely got to the gate early this morning, but found a faster way to the airport which is nice. I don’t know if I like the Monday morning flights as much as the Sunday ones – leaving on Monday seems a little more stressful. But we’ll see what they want me to do.
I haven’t updated the blog since Friday, I believe. As I think I wrote last week, I didn’t expect to run more than around 60 miles last week – however, somehow I ended up with 74 miles (I think), which is the same as last week and equal to my highest mileage ever. Don’t really know how that happened except that I started the week easier and did have a very short day (four miles last Monday as well), and then poured it on late in the week concluding with a real long run for once.
On Friday morning, before I last updated, I ran 8 miles and felt great. That was all I had planned for the day, but after reading Alison’s post about the Olympic action (Thanks for posting that!) I went home and watched the men’s 10,000 meter run. That was amazing. Not only was it shown in its entirety, but it was commercial-free! Wow, that was great. I think that as distance runners we should probably all make an effort to contact NBC and tell them how much we appreciate that kind of coverage, which is so rare for distance running. It was such a great race. I had heard so much about Bekele but since it is difficult to catch track action had never actually seen him run before. His grace and smoothness – it is obvious that he was born to run – are just amazing to watch.
So I was so inspired by the race that I went for a second run around 5:00 pm on Friday, just an easy four miles. That gave me 12 for the day and by the end of the day on Friday I had 50 miles for the week. Saturday morning I headed up to practice at 7:30 am and I was exhausted from not sleeping enough (went to see Garden State on Friday night at 10:00, which was pretty funny). We were doing a 6 mile tempo run which I felt that I should be able to run in about 42 minutes (7 minute pace). However, I started at about 7:20 pace and although I kept trying to pick it up, just couldn’t. I was pretty disappointed about this especially since I have been feeling fit lately but I chalked it up to lots of mileage, not much recovery, and sleep deprivation. We’re all entitled to bad workouts sometimes.
Saturday ended up being probably about a 9 mile day with warm up and cool down included. After practice, M. met me in Boulder and we went for a hike up the second Flatiron which was really nice. It’s been such a wet summer along the front range (and I guess especially in Boulder) that it was really pretty, and very green. It was a really good hike, a good distance (maybe 4 miles total), with some awesome views. You could see all the way to downtown Denver, which is about 30 miles away.
Saturday night I was determined not to go out, so I went to bed over at M.’s around 9:30 because I had to get up at 6:00 to meet a friend from RRB for a long run. We planned to run 18 miles and I think we actually only ran 16 – we ran for 2 hours and 16 minutes, and I can believe pretty easily that we ran 8:30 pace, but I’d be surprised if we ran any faster than that. That was actually fine with me, I would have struggled to run any farther. It was a very good run – C. lives in North Boulder in a great location where you can run to the Boulder Reservoir, all around it, and back and only run on pavement for about 5 minutes.
So to conclude the report on last week, 74 miles and feeling good. That will be my last week over 70 miles for quite some time, I believe, and I’ll try to maintain around 60 this week and then next week drop for an easy week and a small taper for the 10k on Labor Day weekend (this has been the subject of some drama because last year the race was on Saturday, which would work really well for our schedules, and this year it looks like the course has changed and the race will be on Monday).
Now that I am here, the only thing to add is that I've got a workout at 10k pace tomorrow morning which should be cool. Lots of country roads around here.
Posted by barb at August 23, 2004 04:12 PM