Dev on Running

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!

Our vacation in the rain shadow east of the Cascades was lovely — just two hours away from Seattle, yet it gets 300 days of sunshine a year, WHAT — but now it’s back to the west, to rain, to cold temps, and to pants, goddamn it.

Sunshine and shorts are everything. Pants are the worst.

But my lungs are glad to be closer to sea level again, as evidenced by tonight’s run:

Oh, word. I’ll take this over huffing and puffing through majestic mountains at a few thousand feet of elevation any day (not really, but I’m trying to make myself feel better about having to wear pants again).

Let’s reminisce. Shorts in downtown Leavenworth (see how even the Bank of America is Bavarian-themed? Love it):

Shorts in Waterfront Park:

Creepy how similar those pictures are. Can you tell that Aaron’s favorite way to Instagram is to say, “Hey, turn around!” as I’m walking away?

Shorts in the SNOW:

Because even in the snow, it’s still warmer than Seattle! What does that even mean! I need to reevaluate my life!

Here are my final vacation mileage stats, all while wearing shorts:

Thursday

• 6 mile run, 9:00 pace
• 5 mile hike, 1,800-foot-elevation-gain-trudge pace

Friday

• 4 mile hike, easy prancing-in-the-snow pace

Saturday

• 17 mile run, 9:04 pace

Sunday

• Food food food, fast-as-I-can-eat pace

Oh, shorts, we had fun together. I’ll see you again in July.