02/14/2010 - 02/20/2010
In the absence of structured training, I find myself being more open to running opportunistically with whomever or whenever there happens to be an opening. Which is a novelty in and of itself for someone who is normally so constrained by the forces of OCD. Unfortunately, 8 days worth of work got crammed into 4 days of the workweek due to President's day, so opportunistically is really the only way I could fit a decent number of runs into this week. I daresay I did pretty well, but the sleep deprivation was pretty intense by the end of the week.
Sunday 02/14: 7.1 miles, 1:01:35 (8:40 min/mile) Monterrey to Rose Bowl
Happy Valentine's Day/Chinese New Year! Though personally the day was slanted towards the latter due to the fact that my significant other is out of the country and Nathan Lau and Dennis and I cooked a Chinese New Year feast. I didn't manage to wake up a reasonable hour, which meant that I had to wedge a run in during the hottest part of the day prior to picking up a whole Peking duck. Legs kind of felt thrashed, R hamstring kind of bugging me still, went really slow... but overall felt better than other tired, sub-optimally warm runs I've been on in recent memory though.
Monday 02/15: 9.8 miles, 1:16:44 (7:50 min/mile) Whole Arroyo
Nice morning run with Chief, Ryan and Cameron. Well, actually, I arrived late and had to ball it down to Garfield to catch up with them (2.5 miles, 17:42 = tempo run for grossly out of shape me?). Felt sort of wiped out from the early effort, but managed to stick with the group the rest of the way, despite a strong temptation to bail out early onto California. It's actually really nice to have company to pull you along when you're struggling. Strangely felt better once we came out of the trails on the way back. Felt the R hamstring at certain points, but not too bad.
Tuesday 02/16: 5.3 miles, 44:00 (8:18 min/mile) Monterrey to Third Bridge
Gah, back to work... but managed to get a good start by waking up moderately on time to squeeze in a run. I expected to feel kind of horrible from yesterday, but it was not bad at all! Maybe the new year's mochi/cake thingy that we made is magic.
Wednesday 02/17: 5.3 miles, ??? (??? min/mile) Monterrey to Third Bridge
The funny thing is, I was so tired when I got home from work yesterday, that I went to bed without taking off my watch... but somehow in the commotion to get up in the morning, I TOOK IT OFF... and therefore this run is untimed. I guess that is okay, because it psychologically made it easier for me to take today's run really relaxed. My R hamstring still kind of feels funny, and I think it could really use an very easy day.
Thursday 02/18: ~5 miles, 5 laps North Field + 2 mile tempo on the track + 5 laps North Field
I woke up early but I really needed the extra time because my google earth mapping project is still sub-par. Came home at 9:30 pm and decided I could still wedge in a short workout before starting my next presentation. Abridged warm up felt really good, I considered just ditching the tempo and running easy for 45 minutes, but after 4 laps I got bored of running on the NF so I decided to stick with the original plan. 2 mile tempo in 13:53 (6:59/6:54) running really consistent lap splits. The first mile is a little bit slower because some stupid Fleming people had parked their backpacks and their butts in lane 1. Felt good and in control, like under threshold pace. It's actually fairly relaxing to run just one... usually 2 mile tempos come in sets of 3. Unclear if there are any training benefits from today, just wanted to run a different pace than usual, cooled down still feeling good and less stressed than before.
Friday 02/19: Off, shots. Too exhausted after work to do an evening run.
Saturday 02/20: ~5.5 miles, Random Track with Matt and Dennis
Arrghhh... somehow I let Dennis convince me that Matt's slow pace is reasonably close to my normal pace, which as it turns out is not true. Additionally I'm feeling the post-shots hangover pretty badly today. The system just doesn't feel good. I wonder if this will go away, as I've never noticed the effect until very recently. Ran ~3 miles in lane 2 or 3 with Matt and Dennis then 10 laps of the SF just to be sure I ran more than 5 miles. I'm pretty sure Matt mis-counted a lap though because my watch read 18:15 at the supposed 7.5th lap and it took about 7:45 to cover the last 4 laps. Anyways, I suppose it really doesn't matter... the bottom line is that I felt really godawful running a pedestrian pace of between 7:30 and 8 minute miles. Better luck tomorrow.
Week Total: 38 miles... hey, improvement! Only one off day this week.
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