runners | Weekly check-in

It's cold, cold, cold over here (-5°C this weekend and predicted to break -10°C on Wednesday), so I am mostly just proud that I went running at all :)

I managed to do 1 kilometer of uninterrupted running today followed by 250 meters of walking and 750 meters of running. I hope that by the weekend, I will be able to do 1,250 meters of running followed by 750 meters of walking and 1,250 meters of running. That would put me in mid-week 5 of distance-based couch-to-5K

Edited 2010-11-29 19:12 (UTC)

It's getting cold here too, but I've been managing to get out and about. I did a Turkey Trot race on Thursday along with a couple of other 5k-10k training runs. I'm looking forward to/am becoming nervous about my upcoming half-marathon training program, which starts this Saturday. It didn't seem so far until I calculated how long it would take me to run it at my current speed...

I like listening to music while I run and sometimes podcasts. My favorite podcast is The Age Grouper, which is a triathlon podcast done by these 2 guys from Chicago. I find listening to something related to what I'm doing at that moment motivational, like 'if these guys can do it, so can I'.

Let's see... if you count last Sunday in, which for the sake of argument I will, I ran the second longest distance I ever ran in one go, on the last sunny day we had here: 18.7K!

After that, I've been taking it slow, with just one more 5K interval run and a swim. And, if you will, a bike ride downtown to the archaeological museum. I didn't count it as a workout since the purpose was simply to go to the museum, but I suppose three years ago a 21K round trip bike ride would have been huge for me whereas now it serves as an excuse to skip a run.

Ths week don't anticipate any running to be honest - the snow's slushy today and will most likely freeze over for the rest of the week. If my road route is passable, I might head out for a shortish run tomorrow, but other than that I'll probably switch to swimming to get me through the really cold weeks. Which also helps with actually getting better at swimming ;)

As for listening, I've really taken a shine to my iPod's radio function, and have been listening to talk radio (mostly Deutschlandfunk - for the Americans among us, that would be the equivalent of NPR) during all my runs. Their music selection on Sunday afternoons is quite eclectic too - easily matching what's on the rest of my iPod. Which is saying something! XD

I run indoors, so I watch tv. It's the only time I get to see anything that isn't basic cable, and I find myself watching a lot of reality tv. The competition keeps me interested and keeps me running.

2 runs total last week totaling about 11 miles all together.

But one of them was a 5 mile Turkey Trot at which I PR'd in a very big way :-D
(41:45 if you must know) This is only the second race at which I've managed a pace under 8:30 miles. So, yes. Excited about the trot, I should post a race report...

As for music - I tend to Irish folk, sea chanties, and 80's pop. Sometimes these go remarkably well together and other times, it's like audio whiplash.

Haha, we have identical taste in music. \o/

Also, congratulations on that PR!

Edited 2010-11-29 23:53 (UTC)

Congratulations!

24F here, but I had a glorious run on the mostly-plowed path (it snowed all day yesterday) under mostly-sunny skies. It's hard to explain how warm it feels while exercising in the sun even on a cold day - my gloves came off in the third mile and my fleece headband in the fifth.

I'm running a 10K this Saturday. It's supposed to be a very fast course, and it's at 2500 ft elevation lower than where I usually run, so I'm hoping to PR.

On my long runs and easy runs by myself, I listen to audiobooks, mostly borrowed online from our library. I don't listen to anything when I do speedwork, since I can only concentrate on either running or listening.

I usually try to run five days a week and I only got in 4 days last week (Sunday-Saturday), partly because of holiday busyness. Still, I did 205 minutes during the week, which is not far off from the 220 minutes (about 20 miles) I try to do each week.

And then! Yesterday it was relatively warm and I had lots of time so I went to run outside, and I ended up running for 90 minutes (with 3 minutes of walking and shoe-tying mixed in), which is the most I've ever done in one run! (This one time a couple months ago I did like 35 minutes and then 55 minutes an hour later, or something like that.) And! Right in the last minute or two there was this bit of music that I like on my iPod so I decided to sprint while that part was playing, and I totally still could! I felt great! It was the first time I ever thought, "Yeah, I could do a marathon, why not?" while running. I mean, not that I want to do one tomorrow, but it seemed like something I could train for next year or maybe the next, and I had never really felt that way before.

So that was awesome! The rest of my runs this week will probably be inside, and that is okay. I don't have any races coming up, but I'm planning to work on getting faster over the next few months.

PS I sometimes listen to music or podfics or audiobooks. Lately I've been enjoying slate.com podcasts a lot. Music usually works better when I'm indoors though because the track I run on is by the basketball court, and it's often too loud to make out a lot of speech.

Edited (listening) 2010-11-30 01:49 (UTC)

I took a spill on my bike last week in the snow slush and twisted my bad knee, so currently no running for me :o(

Oh, boo. So sorry to hear that.

Weekly check-in

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