Good Days and Bad Days

It’s weird how some days the running can be so on and others so off. Well I can happily say this morning was an on day. Clayton and I did our longest run, 12 miles, aside from the actual half marathon. Here is our route. We went down Palms, up Robertson, down Cienega, over to Jefferson and Duquesne (now I know where the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook is) and finished by going to Culver to Overland and finally back to Palms. It felt so good I could have kept going, but that’s when you risk injury, when you run longer than what’s laid out in your training schedule.


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I was trying to attribute something to the extra energy and speed – possibly the full day off the day before because typically I’ll do a shorter run on Friday and then we’ll do our long run on Saturdays, but this week we saved the long run for Sunday. Also I’ve been trying to get my speed up to keep up with Clayton and I think it’s been working. During the week now on the shorter runs I have a regiment where I use the treadmill at the Sony gym and start at 6.5 mph (slightly over 9 min. mile) and move up to 6.8 and then to 7.0 and then typically end going 7.5 mph (8 min mile) for the last ¼ mile.

As I said, today's run was great, but this past Tuesday's run was not. After 1 mile my calves were burning and my stomach hurt, I stopped for a bit to stretch my calves really well and was able to finish the other 3 miles. I’m learning that you can’t beat yourself up, though; more important is that you stick with your schedule even if some days you can’t get yourself to do the full run. I am definitely having a lot of fun tracking all my runs with the Nike+ iPod which I started using at the beginning of our training.  After 26 runs I’m up to 126 miles and over 19 hours. On to our 8th week of training!

- Carly