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February 26, 2005
Disappointing Tempo Run
After having an early dismissal on Thursday, school was cancelled on Friday. This was quite the blessing for my body. Getting to sleep until a "normal" hour was a significant help in my fight against being so exhausted. The district did not have the closing announced on TV, but I went online and found out around 11:00 on Thursday night, right after Without A Trace went off the air. The school closing allowed me to sleep until about 8:30, which made me feel much better yesterday. I did absolutely no physical activity yesterday, unless you count changing the sheets on my bed (which is quite a challenge!). I think that I am falling into a cross train every other Friday type of deal. Given how tired I have been, rest yesterday was the most beneficial thing I could have done. I have to keep reminding myself that rest is just as important, if not more important, than training.
Every so often our group meets at a different location on Saturday to do a tempo run. Today was one of those days. This park has an inner and an outer loop. The inner loop is 1.75 miles and the outer loop is 3.6 miles completely on the roads outside of the park. The outer loop has a quite a bit of rolling hills, the first mile and a half is a good downhill, from 1.5 miles to about two and a half miles it is a steady up hill, about the next third of a mile is downhill again, and from that point until the end of the loop is a really tough uphill. The schedule today called for two of the outer loop as a hard effort.
This park is further from my house than the school where we usually meet, which meant that I had to wake up earlier than usual to account for driving almost twice as far. When we did this last year, it was quite a bit warmer than it was today because I remember wearing shorts under my tights because it was supposed to get into the 50s but it was only about 35 degrees when we ran. This year it was about 22 degrees when we ran, needless to say there was no thought of wearing shorts! Tights, long sleeves, a fleece, jacket, hat, gloves, and socks were the attire, my hands did get a little bit warm by the end of the second lap, but I would rather them be warm than too cold.
We warmed up for about 3 miles around the inner loop. This was pretty uneventful and easy. I did not look at any of my splits on the tempo run. It was not a smooth or easy feeling run for me. I did the seven miles in just over 46 minutes. I really can not compare this to last year because I had to stop for a loooong bathroom break last year which was the running joke today! The pace was right about the pace that I wanted to run today, but it felt much harder than I would have liked it to feel. I was a bit disappointed because I think that I am in better shape than that effort. I warmed down for another 3 miles with a really annoying guy. We started as a big group and then ran into a group of older men who were on their easy Saturday morning run. A ran with one of the guys who is older and much slower and the faster guy was running with me and would not let up on the pace. He did not seem to understand that we had just done a hard effort and pretty much wanted to race. It got to the point where I was starting to see spots, so I turned back and said that I was going to double back to run the last .75 miles with A. In total I got in 14 miles with half of it at a good pace.
I headed over to the gym after the run. I wanted to ride the bike, but there were not any available, yet there were tons of ellipticals empty. I got on the elliptical and did it easy for half an hour and then got on the bike after that for half an hour. After stretching I did my lifting for the day.
On the way home from the gym I had to stop and buy a bottle of wine to take to the birthday dinner tonight. I also had to drop off a skirt that a co-worker "outgrew" and gave to me to get dry cleaned. The skirt is suede...let me just tell you that getting it cleaned is highway robbery. It will take at least two weeks to get cleaned, will cost $40 and I had to put down half as a deposit!!!! I could not believe how much it would cost. Ok, I feel much better now that I have gotten that off my chest.
Posted by Blondie at February 26, 2005 12:30 PM