I did my Tar Chip 1.8 miler this afternoon. The wind was against me both ways, not really sure how that worked. I felt slower than last time, I pushed myself to take the same walk breaks. I finished in 28:14, which validates my guessed time from Wednesday.
Saturday
I ran on the treadmill today. It's not that it's bad, it's just that running outside is more fun. It was my light day so I was working on my mile again. This time I played with the speed as I ran. As I felt stronger I would up the speed a little and when I felt weaker I would take it down. At one point I was at 4.0 mph but I ended up running most of the time at 3.8 mph. In the last tenth of a mile I started upping the speed again. When I hit the mile mark I was at 4.2 mph and a time of 15:36. I know I can do better as my average mile time for running outside is in this neighborhood. If this week goes well I will be doing my mile outside next Saturday. The only reason I didn't do it this week is I wasn't sure how my body would feel after running outside for 3 days in a row. So far (knock on wood) I haven't felt much in the way of bad affects from running outside.
Sunday
I ran my long run mid-morning today. Since the target is 48 minutes, the plan for today was to run in one direction down my road for 24 minutes and then turn around and head home. In most of the reading I've done the recommendation has been to have hydration on runs longer than 45 minutes. Since this was my first time doing this I decided I should probably take the advice. So I filled up a throw away water bottle and drove down the road to my normal turn around spot and threw it in a roadside bush. It ended up working out really well. I ran to the water spot, took a walk break and sipped a little water, and then through the water across the road so I could pick it up on my way back. As time got close to 24 minutes I started looking for a landmark that might be visible on a satellite photo.
I was in luck there was an old tree line bordering a farm field ahead. It ended up taking me an extra 10 seconds to get there, but it was worth being able to see what this distance would be with one of the online pedometer mappers. Luckily no one trash picked my water while I went down the road as it was there when I came back about 10-15 minutes later. I probably looked pretty funny to the car waiting at the cross road for me to run by. All he saw was a big guy struggling to run down the road. I can imagine him telling the story to someone, "So I pull up to the stop sign and I see this Walrus struggling down the road. I look again thinking Mary spiked my coffee this morning and it wasn't a walrus at all it was just an escaped shut-in who was attempting to run. It looked like he was going to have a damn heart attack right there and then all of a sudden the desperate fatty picked up someones discarded water bottle from the side of the road and he starts to drink out of it, crazy S.O.B.!" Oh well it's not such a bad thing to be the inspiration for a humorous story. I finished the run in 48:32 having only taken 4 walk breaks totaling about 6 minutes. After using runningahead (and my car as back up) to measure the distance I found out it was 2.8 miles. So that felt really good to have covered such a distance. My left foot was the only thing that suffered poorly from the run. I gave it a good rub a couple times through out the day, but by bedtime it still felt a little crampy on the outside edge.Monday Morning
I weighed 336.2 lbs this morning. That is an increase of 2.4 lbs from last week. Disheartening. I know that the scale doesn't measure my level of fitness. I know that the scale also doesn't measure the effort I put into getting said fitness. Looking back for the error in my ways I see two dietary mistakes. Saturday I didn't eat dinner till 8:00 pm which is far too late, and Sunday I had a second helping of taco salad that I didn't need. At this point I'm focusing on the John Bingham quote, "Progress isn't always linear." I'm not falling off the horse. The scale is welcome to feel like a failure but I'm not choosing that for me. I ran 2.8 miles on Sunday, 2 months ago I couldn't run at all. Also on the good side my left foot felt fine this morning.
