Or, In which I babble on about running…
On Thursday I had a 6m tempo run scheduled. Last time I tried to run 6m first thing in the morning I did it on a mostly empty stomach and was a wreck when I got home. This time I decided to be “smart” about it and eat a small bowl of oatmeal 45 minutes before heading out. I guess that wasn’t enough digestion time since I had a sharp stich in my side for most of the first half of the run. The stitch eventually went away but my stomach never really settled. I managed to pull the second 2m of tempo out at about the target pace but I wasn’t thrilled with the run as a whole.
So now I’m not really sure what to do about my mid-week semi-long (6m or more) runs. I’m almost to the point where I’m ready to set my alarm for 5am, eat something, go back to sleep and then start running at 6:30am or so. My alternative is to run in the late afternoon or evening but then I have to deal with timing my lunch/snack eating and the heat. Plus usually I’m more motivated to run first thing in the morning than after a day of work. Plus I play ultimate and softball in the evenings so I think I’ll be sticking to my morning run schedule.
Later on Thursday I very briefly considered running a half-marathon this Sunday. My thought process went something like this: hey there’s a half in Bellevue this Sunday, hey I just ran a 9 miler so I could totally pull off a half, hey I could cancel the rest of my week of training and call that a taper, hey look there’s still time to register! And then reality came crashing down and I realized that while I’m sure I could have finished the race it probably would not have been at a pace I’d be happy with and that doing the half would completely mess me up for my 8K in 3 weeks and I need to be mentally 100% this week at work/school so toasting myself on Sunday would not be a good idea. Needless to say I talked myself out of it. But I did decide to officially register for the Torchlight 8K on July 29 so now I’m committed to that race.
The 8K is an evening run which I’ve never done before. Start time is 6:30 so I’m a little concerned it could be hot hot hot. I ran at 5:30pm on Friday and definitely felt the effect of the heat. I guess I’ll have to do a few more evening runs to get used to the heat despite the above mentioned reasons I don’t like running in the evening.
Today I did a nice 9 miler squeezed between watching the Wimbledon Gentlemen’s final and the final game of the World Cup. I solved my gel problem from a few weeks ago. It turns out that freezing my gels before running does make them much more palatable.
Week 7 mileage was 21 miles (3+6+3+9).