Artichoke's Running Blog (Ken Spence)

5 Miles on the treadmill at the gym.  Not my most favorite thing to do, but I better get used to it since Sharon bought me a treadmill for Christmas to use on ugly weather days like today.  I didn't run this morning as I had to be into work earlier and didn't want to get up and run at 4:00 a.m.  So, putting it off until this evening, came home to icy roads and not wanting to slip and fall like my major crash last February, opted for the gym.  Ran progressively faster for 41:21, or about 8:16 pace overall.  Varied incline from 1% to 4% in places.  Ran progressively faster each mile from about 8:30 pace to finishing the last quarter mile or so at about a 6:30 pace.  Felt pretty good, but I still hate the treadmill.  A 5 mile workout seems more like 10 miles to me.

5 miles in 45:53 tonight or about 9:10 pace.  Very easy on the roads.  Some ice in spots.  Need to run early tomorrow morning as well.  It will be colder.  Feeling fair.

Extremely slow and easy 5 miler or a bit less.  9:50 pace and sluggish.  Partially from running just the night before and fairly hard to moderate on the treadmill the night before that.  Cold with some icy roadways.

A very slow and sluggish run.  Almost 10 minute miles for 5 miles.

5 miles in 43:54.  8:41 pace.  Quite a contrast from yesterday's sluggish run, almost 6 minutes faster over the same route.  Ran with Tina at 5:10 a.m.  I appreciate her being there, especially that early on her day off.  I always seem to run better with her.  She's like my coach and is able to pick up the pace when we start lagging.  Storm coming in tomorrow, but I hope to get in 10 or maybe even 12.  But, we'll see.  I hate running in the wind or snow or both!

I logged this at "fast miles" even though we only ran at about 8:51 pace for 10 miles in 1:28:19.  All of it was on ice and/or snow.  We didn't go out until 9:00 a.m. and it was already starting to stick to the roads.  I met Tina at about 1/2 mile and we felt like the snow was blowing from the north, so we decided to keep our run east to west and back.  That worked great going eastward up the Smelter Road hill to the 5 mile point, but when we turned back to head west it was in our faces the entire time from up on the foothill until we turned south on the golf course road and zig-zagged back through town the last couple of miles.  It was a total white out for a while and the snow had accumulated alot on the roadways during the run.  We were soaked when we got done, but it was one of those memorable runs!