catherine's running efforts

Just a mile on a bike path Eric wanted to explore. The path was a lot shorter than he thought it was. 

*I moved this mile over to Monday because it bugged me that it didn't count toward that week on my graph.  

When I got to the gym I realized there were only 10 minutes left of Monday-Bachelor night! Fortunately there was a whole other hour on after the main show. 

Last week I was chillaxing and I saw a flier advertising a visit from one of the professors at the school where I did my PhD coursework. I talked to some people and ended up at a dinner tonight with him and a few professors in the department where I teach. I had all kinds of anxiety about the dinner - I was pretty sure someone was going to call me out for being adjunct or for being a grad school dropout or for reflecting poorly on one or both schools. Yeah - I have zero academic self-esteem right now. But really the dinner was kind of fun and I realized that in real life no one is as hard on me as I am on myself, and I had a really good little talk with the guest professor about what I would need to do to finish (which was why I wanted to go to the dinner in the first place). It's nice when things don't go the way I'm afraid they will. :)

Also, Elliott still has the cold I accidentally gave her and it's so so sad.

*I moved over the mile from Sunday so it would count on this week's graph.  

A bunch of the women in my neighborhood get together for lunch every so often, so today I went. One of the women runs a few times a week, so we made plans to make plans to run together sometime. It would be nice if there were someone nearby that I could run with once in awhile. Plus, she runs in the mornings, so that would help me transition to morning instead of night running (like I've been wanting to do but haven't since most of the time I can't bear to get out of bed before Elliott makes me). 

I still like the Altras, but I think they stretched.  

Ever since we had some chicken Jun made a couple (few?) weeks ago, Eric and I have been thinking about chicken. We had a bad experience with some chicken from Smiths a couple of years ago and hadn't bought it since (we're not huge meat eaters...or dinner eaters), but the chicken at Jun's house was just *so* good. So I got some at Costco (Costco=safe) and we've had it a couple of times. Eric made some tonight with a bunch of butter (sometimes I think he takes for granted being skinny), bread crumbs, and that garlic spread stuff (also from Costco) and it was awesome. But I went to the gym about 20 minutes after eating, and at 3 miles I got a crazy side ache. Usually I can head off a side ache by focusing on breathing in every two steps and out every two steps, but that didn't work. Then I remembered that someone had talked about this on the FRB and there was something about imagining that you're trying to blow up a balloon. Or something. But that didn't work either, and at about 3.18 I had to stop. But it went away pretty quickly and the rest of the run was uneventful. 

Boring story, I know. But that's how it went.  

Quantum of Solace was on in the cardio cinema so I just ran in there. It's an excellent treadmill movie. 

I'm doing the Rex Lee 5k on Saturday and I can't decide which shoes to wear. The Altras are wonderfully comfy, but they're pretty roomy and even though I've never even almost tripped on them I'm afraid that I won't be able to try to run fast downhill in them (and to be clear, my goal is just to be under 23 minutes so I'm not actually going to be running fast), and I would really really hate to fall down. Especially in front of a bunch of people. So then I think about wearing the Kinvaras, which I used to love so much and are a lot more snug, but then I think that maybe I'll trip myself on *them* because I've been running in flat shoes. It's a hard decision. Even though it shouldn't be because, you know, it's 3 miles and I'm not trying to PR.  

I wanted to wake up and pump for Elliott so that she'd have fresh milk when Eric took her to my mom's house for the day, so it was easy to hit the gym after and start my first day as a morning runner. And I noticed that the morning people don't mess around - usually I feel pretty good about myself when I'm at the gym in the evening, but in the morning people are a lot less soft. I wore the kinvaras and decided that they're too small (huh...Eric was right...), but I might still wear them tomorrow. 

Just 4 miles on the treadmill (after a mile I realized that the sound was playing out of the TV and not through my headphones and I was mortified. That's one of my peeves - it's so rude when people do that. So I turned off the TV and went to a different treadmill on the other side of the room), with .1 at 6:00 every quarter in the last mile.  

I had been nervous about today's 5k because I wanted to be faster than I was at my last 5k, but then last night I realized that the course is long (3.24 according to the website) and there are like a thousand people in it. So I decided not to take it too seriously. I still wanted to try, though. So I started in the third row back and ran with my elbows out for the first quarter mile or so, and then I tried to have a pushing-but-not-all-out pace for the first mile. Usually my first miles are the fastest, but the first mile in this race is entirely uphill and I don't like running up hills. That first mile was 7:44.

The second mile is completely downhill, so during that mile I tried to visualize falling forward (using the decline, not tripping) and told myself that the hill was helping me rest and got 6:33. During the third mile I thought about this girl that had been ahead of me for awhile. She looked like someone I should be able to beat, and I remembered something I had read on someone's FRB about how if you can see someone near the end of a race you can catch them. The third mile has a bit of uphill to it, so I thought about keeping steady. I got a little closer to the girl, and I decided that I'd try to pass her if I got the chance. (Third mile was 7:33.) At the end we have to run around the BYU track, so as we started on that I totally passed the girl and then just held steady. Then she surged and passed me back a few seconds later. By then we were coming around for the last bit of track, and I thought about passing her again. But you know that thing about how people will suddenly sprint and go way faster at the end of a race than they've been going the whole rest of the time? It's super awkward to me. Of course I think that people should do what they want to do, but if you've got enough energy to all of a sudden go twice as fast at the end as you have been going, wouldn't a person rather go a little faster throughout? Or maybe the excitement of being at the end gives people extra adrenaline. I don't know. Anyway, I didn't want to do that. Also I was kind of self-conscious about the whole trying-to-beat-someone-in-front-of-a-bunch-of-people thing, especially since it's not like we were super fast. So she was a little ahead of me. (Last bit was 7:23 pace.) But guess what? It turns out that if I *had* beat her, I would have gotten 1st (instead of 2nd) in my age group (I think). So now I wish I had tried to beat her. Especially since it would have validated that mile and a half where I was thinking about how I could totally take her. 

I was a little bummed because my goal had been to be under 23 minutes, and as I was coming around the track I knew I wasn't going to make it. But Eric points out that since the course was long, if we assume that I would have gone the same pace for just .1 that I went for the .22, my time would have been around 22:34. That makes me feel better.  

Remember how last week I said I had anxiety about going up to 35 miles? I decided to skip that and go straight to 40, so a few hours after the race Eric and I dropped Elliott off at my sister's house and went to the Gold's Gym in Sandy. They didn't have the fancy new treadmills (even though when I called and asked the person who answered said that they did (liar!)), and there were only a few channels on the TV. But it was nice to be running "with" Eric. The first 6 miles were fine, but when I started on the second 6 I was feeling kind of sore. And the last 2 sucked so much. I even went faster so that it would be over sooner. But I'm glad I did it.