My Active Adventures

I you know me very well you know one thing. I am the world’s most easily worried human. Give me just a glimmer of the possibility of something bad and my crazy imagination will run with it. You can imagine what’s been running through my brain since yesterday’s run. It’s been extremely painful to walk, put on or take off shoes, basically painful to do anything involving my right foot. My brain had come up with plenty of horrible possibilities. Sometimes I wonder why I listen to myself. The only bad think I hadn’t considered was amputation!! Of course my brain never came up with a scenario where things were fairly okay and it was a minor injury, not my brain. Well, this afternoon I visited my doctor to have her take a look and give me the bad news. Of course first up was a series of three x-rays. I’ve never had a foot x-rayed. This cannot end well. They would only do x-rays if something’s VERY wrong, so says my brain. The doctor looked at the x-rays in the room with me for a couple minut...

Today I did my second long run of the week, first time I’ve ever done that. Friday I ran 12.02 miles, today it was 14.0. As I said on Thursday, this week was a struggle for me, I just couldn’t get into my runs for the first part of the week. That even led to me skipping a 7 mile Tempo Run Thursday. Friday my mojo came back! After work I headed off to 24 Hour Fitness for a treadmill run as it has for some reason turned back to winter. My training plan called for 5 miles, but I planned on 6 to make up at least one of the miles missed the day before. Well, once I got started I fell into a groove and made up all of the miles! 12.02 it was. Saturday was a day off, and today’s plan was 14 miles using the  pacing plan that they use for pace groups at the Wickedly Fast Half Marathon . I plan to join the 1:45 group so I’m using their basic pacing plan for the next few weeks and working my time down a little at a time. Today’s goal pace was 9:40, so I set up the plan accordingly. Now as we ...

First off, I woke up this morning feeling great. I think I've got my mojo back! I'm looking forward to kicking ass on my run after work today! I've also settled on a new challenge. The Patriots' Run  in Olathe, KS. This race is all about honoring those that were lost on 9/11/01 and those that risked their own lives to save others. The race is a 1 mile course at the Great Mall in Olathe, but it is anything but a 1 mile race! It is 9 hours 11 minutes long. You can run as much or as little as you want during that time. I've lined up my new Ultra partner Jill  to do it with me, and I've gotten some solid "maybe" and "probably" from others. I'm hoping to line up people to run with us. However much they want. But Jill and I will be running to see how far we can get. I'm also going to try to get some folks to volunteer to work a permanent aid station for us. As I said, it's only a 1 mile course, so they can set up somewhere and we will h...

I haven't posted in a few days because I honestly just haven't felt like doing it. In fact, I haven't felt like doing anything. For the last week or so I've just had no energy all day long. I've been ready to go to bed around 7 or so every night this week which is very unlike me. Don't worry, I've still been forcing my runs in, but I haven't been enjoying them. Sadly, I haven't been enjoying anything. I'm pretty sure the ever-changing weather we're having right now along with my races in the cold and rain last Saturday have my body fighting off some sort of illness. I hope it goes away soon before I really get sick. This typically is how I feel when I'm fighting something off. Lethargic and lackadaisical. I just can't get my heart into anything. My mind wants to run, to work out, to go to yoga and karate, but my heart just isn't in it. I know the Wickedly Fast Half Marathon is coming up in just a few weeks, so I've managed to ...

My legs this morning were still just a little tired, but felt pretty good for the most part so I was good to go for my targeted 13.73 miles for today. Why such a specific mileage you might ask. Well, good question. Let’s run through a math lesson real quick: In 2010 (365 days), I ran a total of 709.16 Half of 709.16 is 354.58 Prior to today my MTD was at 340.85 340.85 + 13.73 = 354.58 So if I hit my target of 13.73 miles today I would be at half of last year’s total in only 79 days of 2011 Well, it was a quality goal, but of course it wasn’t going to come easy like I hoped. Why is it that when you target a milestone like that everything seems to go wrong? Maybe it’s mental, maybe it’s Murphy’s Law, who knows. This morning I headed off to 24 Hour Fitness to hit the treadmill to get in my miles. I wanted to use the treadmill today because I thought using it to keep my speed relatively low would help my legs after yesterday’s races. My legs did get tired, but that wasn’t the main pro...

Today was my "double header" in Manhattan, KS. It was a pretty cold morning, 44° at the start of the first run. In fact, it was so cold that I decided to keep my warm up pants and hooded sweatshirt on over my shorts and sleeveless Good Guys vs Bad Girls shirt. My wife & mother-in-law joined me on my trip out there, it's about a 2 hour drive from our house to the race. At first I intended the Aggieville St. Pat's 2 Mile Fun Run to be a nice, easy paced warm up run, but then last night I was looking at last year's results. The website said awards would go to the top 10 in each age group and last year 10th was 16:32.5, that's definitely doable, so I decided to run it hard and see if I could get in the top 10. It was a nice run starting in Aggieville, going around the park and back up into Aggieville. I started up front with the fast people so they could help me push my pace. They blew the horn and off we went. I tried not to look at my watch much, but I could...

WOW!! It's been a long time since I worked on speed like that! In fact, the last time I had a run with a average pace lower was my last 5k on October 9, '10 (7:59 pace). This morning training called for me to really start ramping up my speed. My target of 1:45 for the Wickedly Fast Half Marathon is an average pace of 8:00 so I really need to build up a lot of speed between now and then. This morning was a 6 mile Speedwork Run: 1 mile @ 9:40 1 mile @ 8:00 1/2 mile @ 9:40 1 mile @ 8:00 1/2 mile @ 9:40 1 mile @ 8:00 1 mile @ 9:40 In total it was 6 miles in 53:07 with an average pace of 8:50. It actually felt really good and I felt strong throughout. I expected to really struggle through it being my first run of that speed in so long and my first Speedwork Run in my Vibrams, but that just wasn't the case. In fact, I think the Vibrams really helped a lot. They really force you to maintain better form and posture even in a tough run. Normally in the past I have had a tende...