Month: May 2013

I did a very rare weekday morning run today! Turns out Green Lake is very lovely and peaceful in the wee hours.

I don’t know how you a.m. exercisers do it. It was rough dragging myself out of bed to fit in five miles, and I’m so used to running in the evening that I didn’t ever feel like I hit a good groove.

And yet while I was running, I thought about how races are always first thing in the morning, and I never have trouble then. I guess I need the nervous excitement and energy?

I realized after this run that the knee pain (and, randomly, big-toe pain) I’m feeling is what I felt right before I retired my last pair of running shoes and switched to my current ones.

Thanks to DailyMile, I calculated that my current shoes have 355 miles on them; Runner’s World says shoes should be replaced between 300 and 500 miles. They definitely won’t last through the marathon, so I need to get new shoes and start breaking them in ASAP! I’m thinking of cheating on Brooks and investigating Saucony… more on that later.

After work, Aaron and I met up with Meg and her husband, John, for food at Brave Horse Tavern. I can’t believe it had been a YEAR since I’d seen Meg — remember when she plucked me from my sick, injured, lonely despair in San Francisco? Holy lifesaver!!! Just rereading that post amazes me. What a good friend!

May 2012:

May 2013:

It’s no surprise that the conversation centered mostly on running, fitness, and our upcoming races and relays. Both Meg and I are doing Hood to Coast, and both Meg and Aaron are doing Ski to Sea!

Meg is F-A-S-T, as in she just ran a 1:35 half-marathon (her PR is 1:33) and is going to train for sub-1:30 next. We may or may not have hatched a plan called Operation Devon Gets F-A-S-T (just made that up) that’ll begin after Rock ‘n’ Roll Seattle and involve Meg kicking my ass on the track. I’m excited.

Welp, gotta get up early (like 5 a.m. early) tomorrow for Aaron’s mountain bike race — the same one at which this pic was snapped by the official photographer last year:

Man, time flies. This feels like yesterday.

I’m so glad I’m off those damn crutches.

The Hood to Coast team assignments are in!!!

I’m runner #12 for Team Watermelon (lemonade and watermelon are Nuun’s new summer flavors), which means I get to run the very last leg of the whole relay onto the beach in Seaside, Oregon!

Huzzah!!!

Nuun asked us for our top three runner position preferences, and 12 was my third choice, so I’m very happy I got one of my choices! I think it’ll be unforgettable to run that last leg — I’m sure I’ll be absolutely exhausted, borderline delirious — and cross the finish line with Team Watermelon.

Here are the details and HTC-provided notes about all three of my legs:

• Leg 1: 6.32 miles, medium difficulty, little to no shade
• Leg 2: 4.92 miles, easy, no music allowed on this leg for some reason (no prob, I never listen to it)
• Leg 3: 5.23 miles, medium difficulty, little to no shade, considerable elevation gain or loss (I’m guessing loss, since this leg ends at sea level!)

In total, I’ll run just under 16.5 miles. My position is ranked 6th out of 12 for mileage and 8th for difficulty.

I’m SO excited!!!

Moving on… I’m smack in the middle of week 12 of my 18-week marathon training plan, and feeling like Rock ‘n’ Roll Seattle will be here before I know it.

I adjusted my schedule a bit this week to accomodate a get-together with girlfriends on Monday night, and it’s totally screwing with my legs. Five miles Tuesday + eight miles Wednesday = havoc wreaked on my knees.

Tuesday’s run: Easy-ish and pleasant.

Wednesday’s run: Comfortably hard through mile five, and then my knees started yelling at me. I slowed down a little… then some more… and then WAY more for the last mile.

My knees felt better once I slowed down, but the pain was worrisome enough that I’m going to take Thursday off and get my five-miler in early Friday morning before work (Aaron and I have dinner plans with Meg and her husband Friday evening). I may not do hills, like I usually do, since running downhill is so stressful on the knees.

You hear that, body? I’M LISTENING. No need to mess with me any further. You call the shots up in this joint.

Aaaaand to end this on a positive note, I will show you that I ventured boldly into the exciting world of skirts today. Stripey skirts, no less.

The sudden onset of 80-degree temps and my extreme aversion to pants has forced me to go where my closet has not gone before. I have dresses, sure, but skirts are much more complicated to me. Every time I try on a skirt, I wonder what the hell I’ll wear with it. I just happened to already be wearing a perfectly matching tank today, so I had no excuse not to get it.

Plus, this skirt has an elastic waistband. That means I’ll get to enjoy the kind of comfort that’s usually only considered acceptable in public for toddlers and the elderly.

All the cool people are wearing elastic-waisted stripey skirts this summer. You’ll see.

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you are missing out on real-time whining insights, such as this one earlier today:

I spent miles 14 through 18 trying to decide if I needed to puke or was just hungry. It took all my willpower to choke down my Clif Shots. It probably had something to do with the GLARING, HOT HOT HOT SUN.

It was like full-on summer in Seattle today, and I made the mistake of starting my run around 9:30. My watch shows that I spent two hours and 45 minutes running, yet the elapsed time that it took be to get back home was three hours and 36 minutes.

That includes stoplight breaks, water breaks, shade breaks, sitting-on-the-curb breaks (to curb, haha, that puking feeling), laying-in-the-grass-at-Green-Lake-with-only-1.25-miles-left breaks, etc. I finished just after 1:00, so I ran the last miles during the hottest, most miserable time of the day.

BE YE NOT SO STUPID.

I’m smiling here, but only because I’d been laying in the grass for five minutes and had just finished chugging lots of very cold water from the water fountain. I seriously considered laying there for like an hour.

Alas, I finished the run, but it was rough. 

Not my best run, but certainly nothing to sneeze at for 18 miles. That slow mile 15 was a heinous death-shuffle up a hill.

Oh, I also took my shirt off at mile 5.5 and ran in just my sports bra and shorts until mile 14. It was THAT warm in the direct sun. Ain’t nobody got time to be self-conscious in survival mode. Then the breeze picked up and really cooled me down, so I popped it back on. Fun story, huh?

Anyway, I’m super glad that’s over with. Just a few more long runs to go:

• Next weekend: 13 miles (yesssss, so short!)
• May 18: 15K race + 10 miles
• May 25: 12 miles
• June 1: 20 miles (God help me)
• June 8: 12 miles
• June 15: 2 miles (sweet taper)
• June 22: MARATHON

It’ll be another beautiful day tomorrow. I’m excited to soak up the sun while Aaron competes in the final race of his mountain bike series that counts for the overall awards! He could win the whole thing tomorrow!!!

Oh, duh, he will.

I didn’t forget about my weigh-in! I just… delayed it a little, thanks to the fact that I’ve had a hard time waking up early this week since my body still wants to be on vacation, and the early a.m. is when I usually snap my photo and stitch it together with the photo from my last weigh-in.

Anyway, I finally weighed in and snapped a pic yesterday morning. Helllooooo vacation gain:

April 15: 137.6

May 2: 139.3

Gain: 1.7 pounds

Don’t be fooled, though… I was up to 141.4 right when we got back from our vacation, and I’m sure I was even higher throughout the trip.

I ate whatever I wanted (carbs, cheese, dessert, the works), didn’t track anything in My Fitness Pal, and certainly didn’t weigh myself for five days. It was fun, but I definitely felt the consequences in terms of decreased energy, tight pants, and digestive issues.

I’m SO happy to now be back on track with lots of veggies, protein, and healthy fats, with a few treats here and there! I’ve decided, as a runner training for a marathon, that I deserve a big, fat bagel with cream cheese at least once a week. Yum.

I learned that ONE indulgent meal and/or dessert once in a while is totally worth it, but indulging for every single meal every single day is really not worth feeling like crap. Ugh.

This minor weight gain/major divergence from my normal diet doesn’t seem to have negatively affected my running, though, so I’m happy about that!

Going forward, you won’t be seeing any more photos of my weight on an actual scale, since Aaron got a fancy new one for his birthday that automatically sends my weight to a website that keeps track of it! It also syncs with My Fitness Pal.

The scale also recognizes when Aaron steps on it versus when I step on it, so we don’t have to reset it each time one of us wants to weigh in. Sweet, huh?

We’ve only used the scale a handful of times (skipping four or five days in the middle of these charts due to vacation) and I’ve just logged onto the site for the first time today, so I don’t even know about all the bells and whistles yet. Perhaps I’ll write a more detailed post about it when I do!

Before I say anything else, I have to tell you that during this run last night — no joke — a person in a full gorilla costume ran out from behind a tree and handed me a white, long-stemmed carnation. There were two gorillas doling out flowers to Green Lake walkers and runners, in fact.

I… don’t even know. Apparently this was not the first gorilla sighting at Green Lake, but my gorilla was black, not pink.

Anyway. This run was fun!

It was a beautiful evening (the return of shorts before July!), and I was feeling super-happy to be outside. I saw my split for mile two and was like, “Whoa, I need to slow down! I’ll never be able to hold onto this pace for eight miles.”

I guess my brain hasn’t caught up with my body, since I was not only able to hang on comfortably, but was just a few seconds away from a sub-8:00 mile in mile six! Cray.

Whenever I think about how long a run is going to take me, I still think something like, “OK, six miles, that’ll take about 60 minutes.” Then I remember I don’t run 10-minute miles anymore, and I subtract five minutes. Last night, when I looked at my watch around mile six, I realized I could subtract 10 minutes.

It’s scary to think about setting goals based on faster training runs like this because I still feel like somehow this speediness is a fluke, and I would fall apart in a half-marathon or shorter race if I tried to run this pace. Yet I would be super-disappointed if I finished a race knowing that I could have run faster, but held back because of a lack of confidence in myself.

My upcoming 15K (9.3 miles) on May 18 will be the test! My PR from two years ago is 1:23:07, which is an 8:56 average pace. I remember that felt so fast and I couldn’t believe I ran sub-9:00 miles for 9.3 miles.

Could I shoot for an 8:00 average pace this year? Could I squeak out a few sub-8:00 miles? We’ll see. (I’ll still have to run 10 miles after the race for marathon training… those will be slow.)

Last summer I was recovering from a nasty sprained ankle, running 10+-minute miles, and training to be able to run a whole 5K without walking, with a secondary goal of breaking 30 minutes (I finished in 29:22). That doesn’t feel very long ago to me.

The trick will be to push myself and believe I can do it. I’ve done this before. I look forward to doing it again!