Yes, I know I owe you a race report from HulaMan, and a race report from the Portland Marathon, and a big event announcement. Those will be coming later in the next two weeks. But I did want to let you all know that I'm back on track. I had a great training week this week:
- Sunday: 4.4 miles in 39:33.
- Monday: 4.73 miles in 42:48. It was great getting in back-to-back runs, which hasn't seem to have happened for a while. Also great that both runs were around a 9 min/mile pace, and I wasn't killing myself running 8:20-8:40.
- Tuesday: rest day. Yep, I wanted to run, but for a change I'm trying to be smart about about things like rest and pace.
- Wednesday: 3.41 miles in 29:14. Ok, a little faster than I was planning for on a base run, but I need to burn of some Lucky Charms that somehow ended up being consumed with my lunch...
- Thursday: rest day.
- Friday: 18.33 miles in 2:56:26 (according to Nike+/iPod, but according to my watch 2:57:11).
The long run went great. I was able to go out at a steady pace of 9:54 for the first couple of miles, and it never got any faster than the 9:20s (except for a 9:09 thrown in there on some downhill). And the weather was beautiful: 48-51 degrees, sunny and only a slight breeze that was rarely a headwind.
Tomorrow is going to be a rest day, so that brings the total mileage for this week to 30.87 miles in 4:48:01. Very solid. Now if I can keep that up for 12 more weeks until the Hagg Lake 50k!
The other big news of the week was a great experience at the Oregon Road Runners Club Turkey Trot at the Zoo. This is a great event that I ran back in 2006. This year, Christine decided to run it... so for a bit of variety, and a way to contribute back (both to the ORRC as well as one of our favorite organizations, the Oregon Zoo) the girls and I decided to volunteer. We ended up getting stationed at the entrance to the zoo, which is about 3.7 miles into the 4 mile race. We got to see some very fast runners (the guy who won was probably running close to 5 min miles and "won" this non-competitive race by a minute) and a lot of other people who were out there enjoying the typically soggy Oregon weather (including a cow and an Elvis, along with a number of running turkeys). It was great being able to give back to the running community, and put the event in a whole new perspective. [You fast runners who get frustrated about pedestrians in your way... may I remind you that after you're finished, you're now a pedestrian and should stay out of the way of the runners? ;-) ] It's something I'm looking forward to doing again, and despite some protests at the start of the day, the girls seemed to have a lot of fun too. And yes, Christine ran a great race and we all had a great time.
That's it for now... with any luck, I'll be able to get that big event announcement out in the next week, and then follow up with some race reports. Until then... onward.
