Age is just a number.

Easy 9 miles at Liberty park on the woodchips with Adam and Josh E on the blog.  Great brunch run with some good company and some soft surface easy running on the legs.  Afterwards I stopped off at Dee's and had a huge Lumberjack breakfast then afterwards took a long nap after all those hotcakes and syrup kicked in:)

Taking a cutback this week in training to recover the legs.

Easy 5 mile jog on 7th out and back. No time taken.

Just another easy 5 mile run but a little quicker than yesterday. - (34:07)

7th/Parkway trail out and back.

Easy 5 miles on the treadmill today with one mile at 5:39/ 1.5 % incline. HR and breathing effort at all speeds has come down a bit but anything faster than 10 mph seems a little rapid turnover wise.

 On a side note I am running Utah Valley this weekend!  Way excited to just be in it again. 

Easy 5 miles out and back on 7th. (34:46) Last quarter at sub six pace.  I pulled out the old Pegasus 27s that had only a modest amount of wear and ran in them today. Though they seemed overly cushioned at first, I quickly got used to the ride and by the end of the run  I actually preferred them over my worn out flats. 

Remembering  D-Day today and all of the sacrifices and stories my Grandfather used to tell me about himself and the men he fought with as an airborne paratrooper.

Easy 4 miles early this morning. (26:12)  Threw in some faster stuff to keep the rust off:)

It was great to get out and test myself again after having some really tough setbacks in the past. All things considered this was a substantial improvement both in terms of performance and in health. Considering my last crash I was really unsure about my capabilities on the road as so much of the training I that I had undertaken previously had been done on a treadmill or just plain spotty due to layoffs caused by nagging injuries and life.  In all reality I told Sasha that 1:18 was the target but secretly inside I thought if everything went really well a 1:16 would be the time to hope for. Turns out it was to be somewhere in the middle and so I'll take that and count it as a blessing and as a stepping stone for further improvement. 

 I know that my age is creeping up on me now, but I've seen some pretty incredible times come from some masters age group runners that give me optimism and that there may still be some fire left after all.  I just need to take a more balanced and more broad approach to training. The key will be to find the optimal point and not the maximal one this time. Easier said than done for someone like me but hey there is always tomorrow..

Note-My watch time was somewhere around 1:16:54 but the official was at 1:17:04. Not sure why that is..