Friday afternoon. I did a fair portion of the rest of my upper body workout, low to medium effort.
Saturday morning, woke up around 5am. I felt like my energy reserves had been replenished, but ate a banana and a protein bar anyway, just in case, after I made a cup of coffee with my Mokaman (is that where your moniker comes from Mokaman?). The plan was to do the most essential exercises of my mid-body strength-training routine, and then go out for some sort of recovery run. I was still a little sore from Thursday's run, and so had given up on the idea of doing a third half-marathonish distance for the week. But I would still be heading out that direction. Running east from my neighborhood, there are lots of shorter routes/bail-outs along the way. Here's a map of the 13-mile route in blue, with all the possible route variations in yellow.
I started out a little sluggish, but after a few miles my legs started to loosen up. I decided to make it a 8-9 mile run, so that I could get in around 35 miles on the week:
(Point of origin and finish blotted out in case there's a crazy shoddie troll from RW lurking, waiting to stalk and slay a bfrunner in a vicious, over-pronationalist hate-crime.)
There were already a few other joggers out on the neighborhood sidewalks and then quite a few folks out around Como Lake enjoying the cool morning weather (50F/10C). My wife called just before I hit Como Lake telling me she needed her Social Security card for her citizenship class at 9am. Opps. That was in my office, and it was just before 8am. So I took it up a gear and ran the last 3.5 miles at around 9mm pace.
On my way back, two middle-aged cyclists went by, in full weekend racing kit, one says, "I've been meaning to try that, but I don't know if I have the balls."
I says to him, I says, "A lot of barefoot runners don't have any balls, rather ovaries, and they do just fine."
Anyhow, I kind of surprised myself I could sustain that pace when my legs were still a bit sore from Thursday's slog. 9mm used to be my tempo pace. This seems to indicate two things. One, the increased mileage is really improving my running fitness, as I suspected it would. Two, I need to push myself a bit more at the end of my runs, at least once in a while; I've gotten a bit too comfortable just running purely aerobic pace this last month or so while building up the mileage. There's a nice pace in between tempo and aerobic, around 9mm, that I can probably sustain on most of my mezzo runs.
So anyways, 8.28 miles on the day, minus .09 while walkie-talking to my wife, so 8.19 miles. That brings me up to a grand total of 36.11 miles on the week:
Sun: 14.19 mi run
Mon: 1 mi run, then sick, 1.3 mi walk
Tues: sick, 2.2 mi walk
Wed. Bench press
Thur: 12.23 mi run, 1 mi walk
Fri. .5 mi run, 1 mi walk, upper st
Sat. 8.19 mi run, mid st, .09 walk
Yippee! I took my kids out for pancakes (while my wife was in class) to celebrate my new mpw pr.
Congrats Tristan! Pretty damn speedy!
Oh, and a belated 'Epic run report!' to Bare Lee - enjoyed the photos, Minneapolis looks like a nice city to run around. I've always had a minor fascination with Minneapolis because one of my favourite bands (Trip Shakespeare) from back in the day happen to be from there by chance, so it's nice to see what the place looks like.
Ha! Their bassist John Munson and I used to carpool together in high school for the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony (he played trombone, I played French Horn). We're from the same neighborhood, he's my younger brother's age, but he went to a private school so they didn't know each other that well. He told me later that I was his original inspiration for taking up the bass (I played in the high school jazz band). After college I played in a post-punk band for a few years before Trip Shakespeare got going. So I played a minor part of that whole scene. Warming up for the The Replacements in front of 3000 people was about as big as we got. But I remember talking to one of the guys in The Replacements backstage and him telling me a couple of them still had to hold down day jobs to pay the rent. That's when I decided to hang up my musical aspirations and began my world travels four to six months later. My bandmates were bummed that I was leaving just as we were starting to get better gigs.
I met a lot of Australians while traveling. You guys and Germans are the great backpackers of the world. I love the Australian laid-back, self-effacing attitude. Always easy to hang with the Aussies.
but we better get started on that winter challenge as I would have 4 runs in already this fall.
The challenge is definitely biased against you folks in Winnipeg! You should be given an extra month on either end. It's still a little against us here in the Twin Cities, that's why I focus on the sub-freezing sub-classification.
This year I had my first experience of running in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and I completely concur that's one my favorite place to run now. The running races that are organized there are first rate and the race I ran this summer out there with my daughter was the best condition I've ever ran barefoot on. The views were spectacular, we ran right beside the river on Sheppard. Oh and Lee is not a chipmunk, I had the pleasure of meeting up with him and sharing a few beers to rehydrate after the run.
It's great to hear so many endorsements of my city. I guess I take it for granted sometimes, and complain too much about the winters. But it really isn't too bad in a lot of ways. Just overly familiar I guess.
You guys ran right on Shepard Road, on the concrete, right? Now that I'm starting to get comfortable with 10+mile distances, I'm getting a slight itch to run a half-marathon. I'm eying two January races, the Polar and the Securian. For either one you can sign-up right before, so I could wait to see whether temps will be favorable. In the middle of winter in the midwest I would think there'd be zero chance of loonies trying to blow people up, so perhaps I could talk my wife into letting me do it.
Anyway, it was great meeting up with you. I guess we blew it not asking the server to take our picture together.
Had a blast with hubby runlite01.
Oh? The truth comes out! Very cool to have a bfr couple on here. So many of us have noncomprehending spouses to deal with.
