Wheeler Farm Loops

AM - 10 miles. An easy loop around Holladay w/ Andrea... nice to run with her today, since she dropped me a tenth of a mile into the run yesterday :-) Really pleasant run on a warm morning! This is January? 

PM - 5 miles with a quick stop at Walgreens to run an errand. Legs felt very snappy - good sign after running 25 yesterday morning. 

Everyone knows I am loyal to Saucony, but yesterday Meb Keflezighi and Tom Brady proved that sometimes you can't go wrong with Sketchers and Uggs!

Our latest project - I have to be honest and admit that Andrea did well over 90% of this...

AM - 10.3 miles up to work. Another fartlek workout... warmed up ~20 minutes, then did 10 x 1 minute (1 minute float recovery)... ran about a mile easy, then did another set of 5 x 1 minute. By that point the roads were starting to get slippery so I figured that was good enough for this morning. The first set was on flat roads, second set was uphill. The goal is to make suffering on uphills such a regular occurrence that I don't notice the Newton Hills in Boston. 

PM - 15 miles home. Only had to work a 1/2 day so I was out of there at noon - right when the snowstorm was hitting pretty hard. First 7 miles were character-building, then the sun came out and it was a beautiful afternoon. The highlight of the run was watching the kids kamikaze down the sledding hill (which had a dusting of snow over grass) at Sugar House.

Why you should stay active. 

AM - 10 miles. HCI/Sunnyside/Wasatch. A little chilly!

PM - 12 miles. Emigration Canyon run w/ some downhill tempo on the way back down. On the way up it just felt way too easy, and as soon as I turned around I found out why, as I felt the wrath of the up-canyon headwind. Did 4 miles tempo on the way down in 20:33 (roughly from the firehouse to the post office). Enough to get some turnover, but not beat my legs up too much. Nice to run the canyon in daylight for once. On that note, the days are getting noticeably longer.

A little Olympic Trials stat geeking... In Paul's trials recap, he posted the mile-by-mile splits. I thought it was pretty interesting, so I converted it into an excel spreadsheet and made some graphs that visually show some of the carnage. Here's the blog link, and you can download the spreadsheet there as well: Stats from the men's Olympic Trials Marathon 

AM - 10.8 miles, JAJA run. Compared to yesterday, it was almost HOT outside this morning. We had a nice run, keeping the pace nice and easy. After 8 miles I split off and headed up the hill to work. Free breakfast today, so life is good! :-)

PM - 10.3 miles home. Easy pace... just jogging. Light rain, but not too cold.  I'm supposed to get some bloodwork done at 4pm tomorrow - I thought about this on my run and realized there is no way I can make it that long without eating! I think I'm going to have to convince the clinic to let them draw the blood up at my hospital. It all goes to the same place anyways.

Yesterday I posted some splits from the men's marathon trials. I don't want to be gender-biased, so here's some graphs from the women's race: Stats from the Women's Olympic Trials Marathon 

AM - 11.5 miles up to work. Kept the pace really easy... I think its safe to label it as jogging. If I had gone any faster I would have overheated anyways... the sign at the school on 17th east said 48 degrees. Feels like spring - although it looks like Alta is going to get 4-5 feet of snow b/w now and Sunday, so for the first time this winter I'm actually a bit excited to go skiing.

PM - 10.3 miles home, met Andrea for a few miles along the way. 

OT blogging week continues!... Some of our favorite post-Olympic trials blogs and stories

AM - 11 miles up to work on another warm April morning. In the middle of the run I threw in a little 2 mile tempo @ MP (5:25, 5:16) on the flat section between 3300S and SHP. The other night I slept on my right knee in a weird way, so I've been babying it the last couple days... I did the tempo "test" to see how it would feel. It was fine. The only time I feel anything weird is going uphill for a long time (ie. the second half of every run to work), so I'll stick to the flats for the next couple of days.

PM - 10 miles home. Making Bill Rodgers proud this week. 

I had a full battery of blood work done yesterday - here are the results relating to iron (which I was most interested in getting baseline data for before I start this next cycle of marathon training):

The reference ranges are not for normal adults, but rather some data I found for elite marathon runners (from David Martin and Peter Coe's textbook). So, as expected, I'm where I want to be. An interesting fact is that in cycling, if your hematocrit is over 50%, you are automatically suspended. So you can either take PEDs, or just train really hard and get the same results :-) 

All my other tests came back in normal ranges. My cholesterol is a little higher than I would like it to be (darn genetics - it runs in the family, but its something that I need to keep tabs on). TSH is perfectly normal. My bilirubin was elevated, but what can you expect when you have run 600 miles in the past month? - the body is under stress and RBCs are getting destroyed all the time. I'll see the doctor on Monday, so it will be interesting to talk to him about all these tests and what he thinks they mean. In the meantime, I'll break out my physiology textbooks over the weekend.

AM - 16 miles. Andrea and I picked up Emily B, then went up to Bountiful and ran the Legacy Parkway Trail w/ Kam, Tara, Allie, James, Mark, Cam, and Andy. The weather wasn't too bad - rainy and windy at times, but not too cold. On the way back I threw in a 3 mile MP tempo in 15:22 (5:11, 5:08, 5:03). Obviously faster than marathon pace, but I'll chalk that up to the nice tailwind. This was exactly what I wanted today - just a medium-long run with some tempo. After running 154 miles in the past 7 days, I didn't really need another 20+ miler today.

After the run we went over to Kam's house for breakfast. His wife made us hot chocolate and delicious belgian waffles!  Hard to beat a morning like this on such a dreary day - a great group run, conversations, and a fun time hanging out afterwards.

PM - 4 miles in about 2" of slush on the roads. I was getting too comfortable laying around on the couch, so I decided to get in some character building miles. It was kind of fun once I got out there. Then we went up to The Pie w/ Rob Murphy and family and ate a bunch of pizza!