Freethinker ~ Freerunner

I ran 15 this morning at 70 degrees at an 8:19 AP.  I decided I might start tracking humidity as well as temperature. 

I'm pretty sure the temperature is pretty close to what it was last week, but this week kicked my butt.  My AP last week was 8:08.  I can probably assign most of the slower pace to being a little (read: a lot) worn out from coming off of a 55 mile week as opposed to a 44 mile week the week before.  I could tell by the second or third mile that an 8:00 minute pace was feeling way to hard that early on.  By mile 10 I pretty much had nothing left in the tank, which is discouraging because I fueled more this week than last.  I took two gu's during this run as opposed to one.  I think I will need to definitely take a couple more weeks at this mileage to let my body adjust.   

Recovery run this morning at an 8:13 AP at 74 degrees with 77% humidity. 

I felt a strange kind of strain in the ligament or tendon that runs along the outside of my left foot up towards my ankle.  I think I just landed on it a little too hard coming around a hard turn as I got close to the neighborhood on my way back.  I felt the strain for about a quarter mile.  I am only mentioning it because I felt the same strain in what I think was the same foot yesterday during my long run about one mile from my half way point.  Just like today it showed up for about a quarter mile and then vanished.  I'm not sure where it came from yesterday, but I know today I cornered too hard and strained it.   

I felt pretty good this morning after not running yesterday.  I did cross train yesterday though.  I cut two yards and went to the pool.  Well the pool was more leisure than workout, but I'm considering it cross training since I did do a few laps.  

This morning the temperature was 76 with humidity of 77%.  There was a pretty good wind blowing from the south at 15 mph.  

My AP today was 8:04. 

71 degrees, 94% humidity.  I felt really strong this morning, and ran a pretty easy pace of 7:56.  Taking yesterday off really helped overcome the lagging soreness I felt when I woke up. 

I'm going to focus on sleep and nutrition going forward this year.  I have only been averaging about 6 to 7 hours a night, and I can tell I'm going to need more than that in order to fully recover from each workout. 

I've also been reading Scott Jurek's new book Eat and Run.  I'm about half way through it, and I highly recommend to it to other runners.  He chronicles his life story, including how his plant based diet helped him win Western States seven times.  He has lots of recipes for vegan meals at the end of every chapter as well for those interested.  I've been impressed with his running career ever since I read about him in Born to Run, and I've been slightly interested in the vegan or vegetarian diet since late February of this year.  It seems to be that many of the great ultra runners are either vegan or they incorporate a vegetarian diet into their daily nutritional plans.  Jurek claims that after he switched to the vegan diet he was able to recover much faster from long runs.  This all sounds appealing to me.   

I felt really good this morning.  It helped that it was about 67 degrees.  I think the humidity was 85% when I checked at 5:20, but now at 8:25 is is 69%.  My AP was 7:29.

I have been consistent in running my week day workouts without fluids, and only taking fluids on my Sunday long run for the past 4 weeks.  I will see how that goes as the summer warms up and as I begin to work tempo runs and intervals back in to my training here in a few weeks.  I think I have learned that I can run up to an hour and ten minutes at up to a 7:28 pace without needing fluids.  

Splits:

7:47

7:38

7:32

7:27

7:16

7:15

7:36

7:13

7:25

2:48 (.38 miles average pace 7:25)