Rob Murphy

Took a day off.

Today I ran from my house over to Sugarhouse Park, around the road loop three times and then over to Liberty Park and circled the path there several times. Beautiful morning.

15.25 in 1:54:45 (7:32). Felt good after the day off yesterday.

This morning I met up with a group at the Starbucks on Foothill Blvd. at 5:45 for what I learned would be a "speed workout".

Ran about 5.5 miles in the neighborhood east of Foothill. The run included lots of hard uphill efforts averaging between 200 and 300 meters I'd say. Pretty good workout. Hopefully I'll be able to get in a few more miles later.

100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, core exercises when I got home.

pm workout: 11 miles on the Lifecycle in 30 minutes. A little more strength training and some hot tubbing.

Life was conspiring against my run today, but I was finally able to squeeze some treadmill miles in at Steiner while Abby was at swim practice. Started at 8 mph and worked up to 9 with several one minute efforts at six minute pace. 2% incline.

Big dumping of snow the last couple hours. If we lived in a section of the country that mattered to the media, instead of flyover country, we'd probably be on the news now.

Wavering back and forth as to whether I should do the Draper New Years Day 5k.

Not sure what's up. Fighting a general case of apathy this week. Probably be good to get back into the normal work and life routine next week. A little bit of sunshine would probably help too.

A little over five miles on the treadmill just to burn some calories.

There's no reason why that should have been a good run, but it was.

15 degrees, wind, snow, slush, ice - but I still enjoyed every minute of it. Maybe it was the two layers of gloves?

13 miles in 1:39:53 (7:41). Actually a fairly decent pace considering the poor conditions. I did one loop around Sugarhouse Park but bailed after that since the city hasn't made plowing the road through the park a priority. For those of you planning to run the Beat The New Year 5k tonight, don't expect a fast time and you might be better off with some snow shoes.

18.25 miles in 2:13:06 (7:18). Sunny, about 10 degrees with a serious wind chill up in the canyons where I ran today. Nice run, but tough.

Of course the big news in the running world is that Olympic marathon gold medalist Sammy Wanjiru has been arrested in Kenya for attempting to murder his wife and wounding the family's "security guard", a man named William Masinde. Seems that Sammy turned his unregistered AK 47 on the pair!

Now, you all know that we distance runners are gentle souls on the outside. We tend much more towards passive aggression rather than outright aggression.Seems to me that only a couple things - maybe just one thing - could cause Sammy to go off like this. No mention was made in the article as to whether Sammy "surprised" Mrs. Wanjiru.

The best quote of all came from the Letsrun.com message boards... "Sounds like Sammy is almost ready for the NFL. This is how you bring some street cred to distance running. Does Sammy own Pit Bulls by any chance?"