Positive Running

I spent a half-hour doing standing yoga poses following a Rodney Yee DVD called Ultimate Power Yoga.  These are excellent stretching exercises.  I can't do the poses perfectly, but I can do some form of each of the poses and it felt great. 

Ran 12 easy miles with Kevin on his 34th birthday, the day after my 54th birthday.  We started running with Abtin, but he told us to go ahead rather than slow us down.  However, from our perspective, we ran very slow (possibly as slow as 9 min/mi) because I ran in my Glycerin 8s, which don't seem to absorb a lot of energy and are very slow for me.  I usually run light-footed, and with the Glycerins my feet hit the ground like Clydesdales and require a lot of work for me.  But I'm travelling out of state for business today, so my Triumph 8s are packed away.  It was a warm morning with a high dew point, so I consumed a lot of Powerade.  Overall though, a good way to start the week.

Took the day off from running. Worked out at the hotel fitness center tonight. Burned 900 calories: 500 on the elliptical machine and 400 on the treadmill.  Read more of the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed while working out, which made the time go by pretty fast.

Travel day from Houston to Little Rock.  Took day off to recover for runs on Thursday and Saturday.

Started at 5:30 a.m. and ran 12-miles with Wesley and Kevin at about 8 min per mile on a beautiful Summer morning at around 65 degrees along the Arkansas River. We ran 6-miles out and back.  It was a fun run with interesting conversation.

Wesley and Kevin could easily run under 7 min per mile, in fact, Wesley ran a mile segment of the course in well under 7 min.  I appreciate their patience running at my slower pace, and believe that running with them is making me faster.

Kevin and I each believe that weekday 12-mile runs are really helping to increase our weekly milage and improve our endurance.  Wesley runs almost every day (18 consecutive days as of today), so his weekly milage is already very good. 

Abtin ran with us for the first two miles.  He's is a hard working law clerk with Kevin's firm, and a fast runner who is working on increasing his running milage but isn't quite up to running 12-miles on a weekday morning.  I think Abtin will do very well when we start doing some speed work in the week or so.

I received my hardcopy of Scott Jurek's book Eat and Run while I was in Houston.  Looks like a great read.

Took the day off from running and did some stretching and stand-up yoga poses.

Met Josh, Stacy and Jenny at 4:30 a.m., drove to Lake Syliva (35 miles west of Little Rock, AR) and at 5:30 a.m. started running forest service dirt roads between Lake Sylvia and Lake Winona.  It was a beautiful morning, about 65 degrees when we started, as the sun was rising.  At 5:30, we could see about 60 feet in front of us and by 5:45 the sun had risen  completely.  In that 15 minutes, we saw and heard several deer and saw a small animal crossing the trail when it was too dark to clearly see, but that was the size of a skunk.

We ran 16 miles in about 2 hours and 45 minutes;  8-miles out and back.  Then the others ran another 2 miles out the in the other direction and back so they ran 20-miles.  But I had to get ready to go kayaking the 7-miles of the Little Red River from the JFK dam to the Swinging Bridge.   I returned to Little Rock around 9:00 and by 10:00 was on my way to Heber Springs to kayak the Little Red.  Overall, it was a fun and great way to spend a Saturday.