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September 04, 2004
Cold Toes
This title refers to how my toes feel at this very moment. More about that later since I'm going to try to stay chronological here.
I'll start with yesterday afternoon. I was bored on my day off and decided to ride my bike. I have a nice racing bike, however I rarely ride it. Yesterday was the first time since the Fourth of July that I have been on it. There are not many safe places to ride near my house, so I drove over to a loop on one of my running routes that is just over 1.8 miles. I ended up riding 19 miles in just a few ticks over an hour. After about fifty minutes my hip flexors felt tight, but I am stubborn and I decided that I had ridden that long, I might as well finish out the hour.
This morning I got up for my long run and realized that my legs could definitely feel the last two days. As I said earlier, I did not care how fast I did this run, my main goal was to get at least 16 miles in. I have not run over 13 since late May, so I was not sure how this was going to go this morning. Lucky for me, two of the people in our group are planning on doing Steamtown and wanted to run 16 today, so I had good company. We opted to do something different than our usual 16 mile course, so none of us really know how far we went, but we ran for two hours. Some of the run was on trails (yuck!) and some was through the beautiful museum/estate that I ran through last week. We started out on the easy side, but by the last mile we were running around 6:20 pace. A and I struggled on every hill since we both did hill repeats on Thursday nights. We got back to the high school where we park and still needed about 10 more minutes, so we ran around the school to finish out. We made a consensus that it was a solid 16 due to how fast we were running by the end. I must say that this run was HUGE confidence builder for me. I'm supposed to be running a half-marathon in two weeks and have not had the bigger miles on my legs.
I went over to the gym to do my pool run and other cross-training. I forgot that they are cleaning the main pool and the that the rehab pool was the only pool that was open. The main pool is for the swim team and more serious lap swimmers, they keep it at about 80 degrees. The other pool is only four lanes and they keep it close to 90 degrees. I had thought about doing a longer pool run this morning, but it was so hot in the pool that I could only stay in it for 15 minutes. I changed into shorts and a top and then went and read trashy magazines and rode the stationary bike for 40 minutes. I really don't think that I get anything out of it other than catching up on celebrity gossip, but I still like to do it. My gym just got TVs, but I don't know if they are going to have any way to listen to them yet. I'm going to have to look into if I'm going to start to need some headphones. I got off the bike and really stretched everything out. Finally I did my lifting. I only lift upper body and I usually only do it once a week, so I try to make it a quality lifting session. I did two exercises for each upper body muscle group with three sets of fifteen reps.
On my way home, I stopped and bought a bag of ice. The convenience store only had seven pound bags of ice, so I bought one. I thought about two, but I still can't handle very cold water in my ice baths yet, but I filled the tub with cold water, got in, and dumped the ice into it. I sat in the cold tub for 15 minutes and read to pass the time. Now my toes are freezing, but I'll get over it soon. I really hope that this helps me feel better tomorrow since I have not done a long run in so long.
My brother is coming into town today and the family is going out to dinner tonight to celebrate his birthday. Of course, we are going to a steakhouse (what a great place to take a vegetarian) but he loves steak and I'll have to find something on the menu that I can eat. It shouldn't be too bad, since at this point in my life I am used to finding something on any menu that I will eat.
Posted by Blondie at September 4, 2004 12:33 PM