Weather - Walking - Wonderful Dessert

It was a beautiful day today so I went to the movies to celebrate by seeing Captain America: Winter Soldier. As I was watching a movie about a government turning against it's citizens in real life our own government was setting up for a real life stand off with some ranchers in a land grab of some sort. Real life & art.. After I left the theater I grabbed some strawberries, chopped them up, sprinkled some Splenda on them and took them to Cory's house with some sour cream saying, "Hey, wanna go for a walk then we'll eat this?" Turns out that was just the key to turn the Cory going for a walk lock. We grabbed a neighbor and her four kids and went for a walk. It was beautiful and we were racing a thunderstorm out and back. It was a race well run, and we won.

What this map doesn't show you is that at the end of the walk is a hill, a real life honest to goodness hill. I say hill. It's not that big a hill. According to my GPS it's about 40ft (4 stories) in 0.15 miles (or 792ft) Somehow I don't think this is right. It's a lot steeper than I'm coming up with at only 5%. The problem is my map doesn't show where the hill starts so I'm using where I started running to find it, but I started running before the start of the hill. My peak speed was over 11mph. It wasn't for long, but it WAS up to the base and then half way up the hill. I slowed significantly as the hill got steeper.

The point is though, I ran all the way to the top of the hill and beat both 12 year olds who were on bikes to the top. They were both surprised. I was also surprised. My 31 & 40 year old friends were also impressed. She said, "I've never seen a white-boy run that fast." He said, "I don't think you should run that fast while chasing boys on bikes out in public any more." I don't think they were as appreciative of my athletic form as they should have been.

Couch to 5k: Week 2 Day 3

Here it is the last day of week 2 on my Couch to 5k week run up. I'm doing well in spite of the break I took due to work being profoundly weird for 4 days.

My running is a good thing. I'm not good at it yet. I won't lie. I run and walk for half an hour and I think I run too fast because I run faster than I can talk comfortably. That's not what I'm supposed to do. The problem is on treadmills I can see how fast I'm going and I pay more attention to things like my speed and pace than I do to my breathing. That's stupid. I need to learn to run for comfort and not for speed, especially right now. The thing is, I can't find any good sites that will tell me what a good speed is for me. Somewhere should be some sort of average speed for a 40 year old male beginning runner that says "If you're running 6 miles an hour you're fine. 7 is a bit too fast, and 5 is too slow." But no. I can't find anything that says that. What I find instead are sites that say things like "Don't worry about it!"

Here's another annoying thing. So many sites give times NOT in miles per hour, but in minutes per mile. What the hell?!? Where will I find that anywhere else?!? I don't have a mile measured out that I walk and then time it. I have a watch. It tells me when I've walked a given unit of time. *sigh* I need to memorize the conversions. 5 mph is 12 minutes per mile, 6 mph is 10 minutes per mile, and 7 mph is 8.5 minutes per mile.  Really good racers run 4 minute miles.

Running form is something I wish I had a trainer for. Whenever I focus on fitness either diet or exercise I'm always surprised at how often about.com shows up at the top of my search results. There is some good running stuff over there, and this video about proper running form is helpful.