PLANNED MILES: 17
COMPLETED MILES: 12
Another week, another fun running journey.
I saw this meme on Twitter and chuckled. It reminded me of the 1st time I went for a run during my graduate years. That run pretty much happened because I wanted to run away from my experiments and some of my coworkers. To be frank, it was either go for a run or catch a case.
RUNNING
Over the past couple of weeks/months, I have mentioned my desire to find alternative places to do my training and long runs just for a little variety because I typically run in two places: the rec center or Mt. Trashmore Park.
During Sunday’s run, it hit me. Mt. Trashmore probably is one of the best places for me to run for a couple of reasons.
It’s super close – about 3 miles from my house.
The park allows one to have a range of running workouts. I don’t think that I’ve had the same long run since moving to the area. You have so many combinations of routes with various levels of difficulty. For example, you can simply run the perimeter of the park for a pretty easy terrain or you can incorporate one or both of the park’s hills (“mountains”). Eek, speaking of combinations (and I guess permutations) reminds me of those stupid formulas from middle/high school math: nPr (premutation) and nCr (combination). You know I never really “understood” those things until graduate school. I only understood those in graduate school because I had a part-time job as an SAT tutor, so I really had to learn them to teach the youth.
While I’m not saying it is the absolute best place to run, it works for me. One con of doing training runs at Mt. Trashmore: the birds will use your car as a toilet when you park near Lake Trashmore. Normally, I don’t get too upset with a little bird poop. However, in this case, I was annoyed because I just washed and waxed the car a few days ago.
Perhaps, this was karma getting back at me for complaining about my weird poop schedule before this week’s long run.
Now that I’m a few weeks away from one of my two March half-marathons, I’m at the point where I just want to get them over with. That said, I’m still enjoying my training runs now that I’m running a half instead of a full in March. For instance, I did not run as many hill intervals as I would have liked to on Wednesday, but I really enjoyed the workout.
The idea pretty much was to run the span of the highest point of the big "mountain" for about 45 minutes and do a recovery jog around the perimeter of the "mountain". Unfortunately, I had to alternate between running and walking the hills. Hopefully, I will get to the point where I can do this training run for at least 30 minutes without having to walk.
Long Run Chronicles:
This week’s 10-mile long run went pretty well. For this weekend’s long run, I ran several laps around the park and followed each lap with a big hill.
Now, that I'm getting decent and consistent distance under my belt, I think that it's time to crank it up a little. Actually, I'll take that back. Let me focus on running the whole stretch, then cranking up the speed. For now, I'm still alternating between running and walking for my long runs. Typically, I will run 0.75 miles and walk for 0.25 miles. While I know it is perfectly acceptable to walk during a long run, perhaps, I can work on running the 0.75 miles a bit faster.
What an interesting coincidence: During one of my walk cycles, I noticed that Tamta's Replay was playing while I hit 8.08 miles.
It’s “funny” because the singer says something like: I know you miss the taste, and my heart beats like an 808. You need my love on replay, replay, replay, replay, replay.
Hey, I didn’t say that it’s a lyrical masterpiece. ;)
INTERMITTENT FASTING:
Since IFing is going well, I'm gonna start integrating Beachbody's 21-day Fix (at least during the weekdays) for my feedings. For this plan, the daily number of food containers for the various food groups is calculated by using your weight, basal metabolic rate, workout calorie burn, calorie deficit (if you want to lose weight).
I’ve tried doing this a few times in the past, but it never really worked out because:
I don’t think I was as dedicated and motivated to do it. Hey, we were in the pandemic when I first considered this program, and you don’t really notice weight gain while you are working from home in sweatpants.
I found that I was still hungry with the portion amounts. Since I now am satiated with less food thanks to IFing, perhaps, it will not be as difficult to stick to the daily container amounts as in the past.
It takes quite a bit of meal planning.
TRAINING PLAN:
Goals for the week:
-Increase the intensity of my non-easy runs.
-Nightly stretching and foam rolling. I know this has been up here for a while, but I’m still not consistently doing this. I’ve changed the time of my alarms so I’ll do these earlier in the evening rather than an hour before going to sleep.
Long Run Playlist:
I think my playlist for my upcoming half marathon (errrr, I mean half marathons) is ready. Actually, I take that back because I would like to add a few Broadway musical tunes to this playlist. It seems as if taking things back is a theme for this week’s training update.