One City (Half) Marathon Training Wk “6"

PLANNED MILES: RUN AS YOU FEEL WEEK

COMPLETED MILES: ???

We're getting there!!! Finally, this half marathon is next week. Since nothing really interesting has happened during this training week, I guess that I'll do random thoughts about running and fitness.

RUNNING

-While the One City Half Marathon is less than a week away, I have to Gob (from Arrested Development) myself:

Why? Bib pick-up is on Friday, and I have to arrive at the parking site by 6 am to catch the shuttle to the start line. That’s not an issue, but Newport News is about 45 minutes away (and 33 miles) from where I live. Basically, I have to make TWO Newport-VA Beach round trips in the span of two days. Forget free parking, could I also get a gas voucher? Hey, these are the things we do to get a tech shirt and a medal. 😉 Regarding race day, I wonder if I should stay with a family member who lives a little close to Newport News.

-At this point, it’s kind of “it is what it is.” I’m pretty much going to do this run as a run-as-you-feel half marathon.

-Since my local rec center is closed until March 1st, I had the opportunity to check out a couple of other Virginia Beach rec centers. I’ll say VB Parks & Rec overall has done a great job with its rec centers because they definitely have improved since I was a youngin’ living in the Old Dominion state.

-One LOL during one of my rec center experiences. Um, why the hell is the stretching area in front of two single-user restrooms?

I don’t know who was more embarrassed: 1. me, who was engaged in multiple weird and awkward yoga poses, or 2. the people going in and out of the restroom? Maybe I was more embarrassed because I would assume the regulars are used to it. 😉 Oh, I gotta give the rec centers mad props (do people still use that term?) for having free lockers.

Again, when I was a youngin, I remember pissing off my parents by realizing that I had to put something in or take something out of a locker AFTER closing. Back in the day, the lockers were 25 cents (and you had to use quarters) every time you locked it.

-Danza Kuduro probably is one of my favorite go-to songs when starting a cardio (eg running, spinning) workout.

-During my self-directed spin workout, I had the opportunity to hear different versions of "Gloria" in three different languages (English, Italian - the original, and Spanish). It's kind of funny because my 6hr playlist was on shuffle, but it played all three versions within a 45 min workout.

Long Run Chronicles:

Eh, nothing to report here.

INTERMITTENT FASTING:

No major updates. However, I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to my weigh-in on the 1st

TRAINING PLAN:

Goals for the week:

-You know what? No goals this week. 😉

-I lied. Investigate some spring half marathons. Since we are traveling to Spain in April, I want to shoot for another half marathon in May. Actually, I should double to check to see if there will be any races of interest held during our visit. Unfortunately, I already checked,  and Rock n Roll Madrid occurs the week after our trip.

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.

One City (Half) Marathon Training Wk “5"

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.

One City (Half) Marathon Training Wk “4"

PLANNED MILES: 15

COMPLETED MILES: 17

First, happy Superbowl Monday . . . if you celebrate. I was celebrating with the Puppy Bowl.

RUNNING

Now, that we are less than one month away from my upcoming half marathon, I think it’s time to turn up the training. Let me take that back, I’m not planning to dial up my training for this particular half marathon. I think it’s time to start pushing myself for my general running health. While I have been doing the majority of my training runs, I will admit that I have not been putting in a full effort. Well, I’ll also take that back. This week, I did a mile-repeat workout, and I was a bit surprised with how fast I ran the mile intervals. So, I think it’s time to rip off the bandaid and start pushing myself in my training runs that are not easy runs and long runs.

INTERMITTENT FASTING Long Run Chronicles:

Since moving (back) to the area, I have been looking for a new spot for my long runs, which I still have not found. I’ll take that back, I have received great suggestions, but I’ve been too ‘lazy’ to act on those suggestions. While I have done all of my long runs at Mt. Trashmore, I think that I stick to this park because:

• It’s close to my house.

• It’s familiar.

• I’m not tired of it yet.

Regarding the third bullet: Although the park is the same, I don’t think that I’m bored with it because I can switch up my runs in the park. For instance, I can just run a bunch of big loops, or make my run a bit difficult by incorporating the big and small “mountains”. During this weekend’s long run, I alternated between running the perimeter (or near perimeter) of the park and running the perimeter with adding the big or small “mountains”.

The plan for this weekend’s run was to run 9-11 miles. Normally, when I have a range as an option, I usually go for the shortest distance. However, I was like let’s push it to the max and run 11 miles by the time I hit 7 miles. BUUUUUUT, somewhere around mile 8, I took a nasty fall and decided to end the run at 9.5 miles. No worries, I did not injure myself . . . except for my ego.

INTERMITTENT FASTING:

IF’ing is going very well. I’m now at the point where I’m getting fuller with less food. Hopefully, I will begin to see some of these beneficial effects on my wonderful bathroom scare.

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.

One City (Half) Marathon Training Wk “3"

PLANNED MILES: 18

COMPLETED MILES: 19

Since I switched my full marathon registration to a half marathon, things have been going pretty nicely. Running has been great this week, and with every workout (including other non-running workouts), I feel my mojo returning. FINALLY. Yup, having other interests is a great way (for me, at least) to have more focus on my running. The only problem (at least for me): sometimes I feel like I spread myself too thin, which may lead to burnout.

RUNNING

Ok, so Hell has frozen over. As some might know, I typically do weekly HIIT workouts with the November Project VB. By typically, I mean from time to time. The group meets on Wednesdays at 6:15 am for HIIT and on Fridays at 5:30 am for training runs. Hell froze over, (makes sense - we had some really low temps last week) because I made it to the Friday workout. Put it like this: it's hard for me to make the Wednesday 6:15 am workouts at Mt. Trashmore, AND I live only 15 minutes away from our workout spot.

The workout was pretty simple: run back and forth across a bridge overlooking the Va Beach Expressway – pretty much 0.5-mile repeats for a good 30 minutes.

Although I have mentioned that it was been tough for me consistently attend running clubs for multiple reasons. I will say that I enjoyed the workout because I noticed that I pushed myself to catch up to (and in some cases pass) other folks. I started at the back of the pack (on purpose) and wanted to see how many runners I could catch. Also, I wanted to make sure the terrain was fine because it was still dark at 5:30 am and I left my headlamp at home.

I really hope that I can make future Friday workouts for a few reasons:

• The training is geared toward preparing for the Shamrock Half/Full Marathon in mid-March.

• It was great to finish my workout by 7 am.

• It was nice to hang out after the workout. Unlike the Wednesday workouts, some of the November Project folks grab breakfast after the Friday workout. Although I am doing weekday 16:8 fasts, I did hang out but just had a black coffee.

ZUMBA TIME:

I had a very interesting Zumba experience last week. Since Friday’s Zumba class left me a bit sore for my long run a couple of weeks ago, I decided to attend Wednesday’s class. Also, I made sure to get there very early so I could secure a spot closer to the front of the class. Right before Wednesday’s class a woman jokingly said that I took her spot. Then we had a brief conversation that went something like this:

• Lady: I was joking about you taking my spot. It is really nice to see men in the class, and I wish more men would attend.

• Me: It’s a great workout. I like it because I tend to burn more calories than a regular 45-minute workout.

• Lady: That’s the reason I like Zumba. . . Oh, I see that you are married. I hope your wife does not mind you attending a class with a bunch of sexy women.

• Me: Eh, my husband is cool with it.

• Lady {probably trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t offend me}.

• Lady: Oh, Oh, OH! THAT’S GREAT

LONG RUN CHRONICLES:

So I kinda skipped this weekend’s long run. No, I’m not in another funk. Like most on the east coast, we had VERY cold weather over the weekend – more so on Saturday than Sunday. Instead of running on Saturday, I decided to do Shaun T’s Insanity Max and a 2.5ish mile walk indoors. When I woke up on Sunday to run, I noticed that my legs were a bit sore from the previous day’s Insanity Max (ie HIIT) workout. Rather than pushing through the pain, I decided to take a day off from running and streamed a yoga workout on Beachbody on Demand.

INTERMITTENT FASTING:

I think this is going well because I am at the point where I don’t need to eat as much to become full. Also, I’ve noticed that I’m not in starvation by the end of the 16hr fast even after completing a morning workout in the fasted state. In March, I think I’m going to try to do 1-2 18-hr fasts during the week.

TRAINING PLAN:

Goals for the week:

-Keep on keeping on.

-Nightly stretching and foam rolling.

-Update my Spotify running playlists.

Long Run Playlist:

This isn’t a playlist per se, but this song has been on a constant repeat for most of the week. There’s just something about the way Karmento sings this song, Quiero y Duelo (Longing and Pain/Grief), that makes you really feel the song. From my understanding, the song is about a young girl who wants to set out and explore the world. While her parents are fearful, they let her go out but tell her that she always can return home. Where I am in life (even my running life) this line really has significant meaning for me. Y distinguir, en mitad del quiero y duelo si se ha parado el velero o navega en calma. (To distinguish, in the middle of/between longing and pain/grief) if the boat has stopped or is calmly sailing