Wow! Been a while

How'd so much time go by so fast? I say fast, but if you'd been living it with me it'd be so incredibly slow. Personally there's some stuff going on that's kind of messing things up in my life and all that. It's super frustrating how little control I have over all this stuff and yet it affects me profoundly. Through it I've managed to keep running. Not like I've wanted to and not with the focus I should be running. It's not that I'm not still enjoying the running. God knows I need the time out there running to clear my head of the cruft from real life. The problem has been eating. It's hard to run when there's no food in you. I've lost a bit of weight from the past few weeks. On the one hand that's nice because there's less of me to carry around out there while I'm running. On the other hand it's hard to have decent energy when there's not much food going in, and sleep's been a complete wreck. Not a recipe for great running readiness is all I'm saying.

I'm still intending to race on the 15th. My training has slipped. It's not what it should have been. I know. It's only a 5k, but it's my first 5k on the ground and not on the treadmill in weather,  (Mostly sunny, high of 73 is the prediction so far but that's a week from now) My best friend won't be able to be there to watch me cross the finish line. He told me he wanted to go, but wasn't going to be able to go, our schedules didn't line up so it'll be just me out there. That makes me sad, but the part where I know he'd have gone if he could have, that means a lot to me. It means everything to me.

So, just a quick post to let you know I'm still out there running, still on here posting, and still going to be racing on the 15th.

Run for Ronald 2010

I'm going to talk about this a couple times for two reasons. 1) It's my first race and 2) It's for a charity I think is kinda cool.

I found the Run for Ronald 2010 race on Active.com a great site for finding events to participate in near you. They have running, biking, swimming, and other type events you can find near where you are or where you want to search. Registration is free and it's a great site. I highly recommend Active.com if you're interested in finding races of any length.

On May 15th, at 8am I intend to be lining up near Kiwanis Field in Des Moines, IA to run my first 5k. My goal is, to be honest, finish it. My secondary goal is to finish it in under half an hour. But I'm not trying to put a lot of pressure on myself. I just want my first bib and official finish time. One of the things I've heard about runners is that the difference between runners and joggers is the race. I get that it's a race against myself and my PR (Personal Record).

So. A friend of mine has stayed at a Ronald McDonald House before because their son needed medical help far from home and well, hotels can get spendy if you're there for a while. The Ronald McDonald House provides housing for people who have kids in the hospital. I think that's a great reason to raise money so that's my first race.

Long Run on Saturday & Race News

So, I went almost two weeks without running due to work taking me out of town. Now, while I probably COULD have run. I didn’t. I was beat when I would get done with work and it was all I could do to make myself go for a half hour walk every other day.

So, when I got back home the first thing I did was fire up my iPod, tune into week six of C25k and run. I ran an hour instead of 36 minutes and wound up running 5 miles. I didn't mean to do that much on my first day out in a long time, and the last mile was at a brisk walk but still, that was pretty decent distance and time for first time out. Next were two days back to back off, and tomorrow is another running day. It's good to be back home and back on a schedule again. I like running and missed it while I was gone.

I used to use gowagon.com for keeping track of my runs online but then they merged with their parent company buckeyesports.com and that site, while functional is pretty ugly. So, I've imported my runs over to my new log at the dailymile.com, you've probably noticed the giant honking widget on the right from dailymile.com. I'll be switching to the smaller widget soon, but I was pretty thrilled by the five mile run so I went with the big one.

I've registered for my first 5k race. It's in Des Moines, IA and is a charity race for the Ronald McDonald House: Run for Ronald 2010. A friend of mine's kid has wound up going to the hospital quite a bit and they have used the Ronald McDonald's House sometimes while they're there. So, if you're interested in making any donations let me know, or just drop it in any McDonald's. The money is for a good cause and they're there for people who need the help.

Hangover 5k

The Hangover 5k is a virtual race set up by Todd over at 5k101. A virtual race doesn't mean you don't really run. You do. The thing is the people you're running with aren't right there next to you. In this case Todd set up the race to start at 11AM Central Time on New Year's Day so a bunch of us, in whatever time zone we were in, laced up our shoes and hopped on the treadmill or went outside and warmed up so that at race time we clicked the GO button on our stop watches and ran 5k. When we were done running 5k we clicked STOP on our stop watches, recorded the time, and sent it to Todd at 5k101 and he reported all our times. We ran together without actually BEING together. It's a cool way to run a race if you don't know anybody locally that runs, and also cool just as a part of the online running community.

I started running Sept 12th, 2009 and my goal was to train through the fall and winter and be ready in spring to run a 5k in under half an hour. That isn't a terribly ambitious time as I later found out, but I knew nothing about running when I started except that I'd never done it before. I'm 41 and my running consisted of things like running a temperature and running for the bathroom after too much to drink. So to run 3.1 miles in half an hour seemed as likely to me as climbing to the moon.

Today, January 1st, 2010, after a pretty lack-luster running week truth be told, I took yesterday off completely to rest up for today, I ran the 5k virtual race in 29:52. Yep. I made my goal 3 months early by 8 seconds. And I could have run faster had I not been on a treadmill. If you look at my pace chart you see the uptick at the end, that's where I sped up so I could get the race done in under half an hour. That chart is from Nike+ and I really like the iPod and shoe thing. The graphs and the community and challenges on that site are great.

For the race I didn't wear the new shoes I got a few days ago. For one thing I need to modify them to accept the Nike shoe-pod since they're New Balance shoes. The thing that you see advertised to tie to the laces and put the pod in has absolutely never worked for me, not even once. I taped the pod to my shoe and THAT worked, but the bought ones don't work. Very annoying. If you're considering buying one do so with the understanding that, in this blogger's opinion, you'd do better with tape, which is almost free compared to what they charge for these non-functioning things.

I used money I got for Christmas to buy two CD's to listen to while running (They exist as CDs and MP3s which is what I really used). They're cadences from the Marines and the Navy Seals. They both have high reviews on amazon.com and today I listened to the one for the Navy Seals. I gotta say, as a former Navy guy they were cool to run to. The pace was right. They were motivational, and they were funny. If you're a hippy-dippy-peacenik you might not want them. They DO mention guns and killing commies. They were great for running. I'm not sure I'd use them for biking, spinning, or any other cardio really but for running, they were perfect.

Great way to start 2010 though with a race where I set a PR (Personal Record) and felt great afterward. I remember in September when I was going to set the goal of just finishing a 5k by running the whole thing without walking and thinking that was ambitious and how far I've come in that amount of time. I look forward to continuing to run. I look forward to being able to run outside again and I look forward, to starting my cross training. That was supposed to have started already but I never did actually DO it. I just talked about it.

Oh, one thing they warn about when running a race is to not change things. I like water when I run. I know I don't NEED water when I run. I don't run that long. But I get thirsty so I drink water. I went to the convenience store and Propel was on sale cheaper than water and I don't drink the water from my house because it's well water and smells like rotten eggs. So, I bought Propel, not because of advertising, but because it was on sale. Ugh. I know why it was on sale now. I'll never buy it again. The kiwi-strawberry one was sickeningly sweet. I drank two swallows and threw it away. I wasn't that thirsty. So, the advice to not change things up when you're racing... good advice. I should have stuck with water.

Website update: You'll see on the right a new widget where I plan on tracking my Personal Records (PRs). I wont' include training times in there, only race times. It's my blog so I'm including Virtual Races. I hope you can sleep nights with that because I can.

Came out to a friend today...

Came out today to a friend. You read it right. Today I told my best friend that I wanted to run a 5k race in spring. It was the first time I'd talked about running out loud to a friend in a serious way. I've been here, but nobody reads this that knows me, or if they do they've made no indication that they know I've been running. It went well. He didn't burst out laughing. When I told him at lunch, that I was running at three today he didn't laugh then either. He and a friend went out to the path to meet me on my run, but I'd left early so we just missed each other. My hope was they were there to be encouraging. My guess is they were there to see if I was gasping for breath or not when I ran. Either way, more people know I'm running now. I don't know if I can say I'm a runner until I run a race. I may still just be a jogger. But today was a put it on the calendar day... came out to friends as a runner. Activity Route: -- Elev. Avg: 1102 ft Location: Fort Dodge, IA, Elev. Gain: +0 ft Date: 10/11/09 Up/Downhill: [+127/-127] Time: 03:18 PM Difficulty: 2.0 / 5.0 Weather: Cloudy 37 F temp; 44% humidity 37 F heat index; winds SSE 4 mph Performance Distance: 2.52 miles Time: 0:35:00 Speed: 4.3 mph Pace: 13' 53 /mi Calories: 351 Map Elevation (ft) Pace (min/mile) Splits Mile Pace (min/mile) Speed (mph) Elevation Gain actual +/- avg actual +/- avg 1 12' 57 -0' 56 4.6 +0.3 -36 ft 2 13' 21 -0' 32 4.5 +0.2 +26 ft end 16' 54 +3' 01 3.5 -0.8 +9 ft Versus average of 13' 53 min/mile

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