Winning Back What I Lost

Back to the grind w/ more hill training.  Ran an out and back from Les Bois Park to Table Rock.  Legs felt good but my heart rate was racing from the get-go.  Not sure what that was about.  Nice easy pace, 9:27 on the way up and 8:32 overall.  I plan to run again this evening.  I was travelling on Saturday so I wasn't able to get a long run in again this past week.   

Late PM:  TM run; 1 mile warmup, 6 mi @ 8:28 pace w/ 1% incline, .3 cooldown.  Eclipsed my previous PR for monthly mileage that I achieved in February.  I'm hoping go over 200 miles tomorrow.

Afternoon:  Lunchtime GB run cut short by rain; 4 miles @ 8:13 pace; Started listening to An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography by Paul Rusesabagina.  Rusesabagina was a hotel manager in Rwanda during the mid-90's Hutu genocide of the minority Tutsis and the inspiration for the academy award winning movie Hotel Rwanda.  He used his connections to shelter Tutsis and moderate Hutus sympathyzing w/ Tutsis.  The first part of the book attempts to clarify the idiocy behind the dutch colonial distinction between the two tribes/races.  From what I gather it was based mostly upon such critical factors as one's heighth and the length of one's nose.

Lunch: Ran an out and back from Fort Boise Park up Shaw Mt Rd to about 1.5 miles past where the pavement ends. This is actually a better workout than Table Rock because it has at least some uphill on both the out and back portions. I thought I was really starting to turn a corner on my hill training but my legs and lungs just weren't there today. I continue to run pretty strong and improve my downhill pace but I've experienced very little, if any, discernible improvement running uphill. I went so far today as to abandon my beloved Ipod in an effort to focus more intently on slower, deeper and more controlled breathing. This sounded good in theory but didn't work very well in practice. After 1/4 mile I was breathing shallow as ever. No more hill training this week until Saturday when I plan to run an out and back to Aldape Summit.

Early AM: Got up @ 5:30 and slogged through 5 miles on the TM; took a while for me to warm up but eventually got it in gear and topped out at a 7:40 mi pace; 8:30 pace overall. Did I mention that I hate running in the morning?

Lunch:  A rather uninspired and tight lil' run on the GB; it was threatening to rain but then the sun broke out and I was terribly overdressed; I was still feeling the lingering effects of this morning's early run along w/ yesterday's hill training.  I'm 100% certain that I won't run twice tomorrow.  5 and change miles @ 8:25 mi pace.  Weight still hovering @ 175 lbs. Aargh!!

T/M: Yasso 800's @ 7:30 pace w/ 4 min jog in between; just a light tune up for the real workout tomorrow afternoon.

Long, up and back hill run today from the first cattle guard on Shaw Mt Rd to Aldape Summit; my son wanted to tag along and see how far he could make it; he's running the half mile and mile in 7th grade track but he's never done any hill training; I jogged alongside him for the first couple of miles and then decided to pick up the pace a bit and go all the way to the summit and meet him on the way down; the last mile to the summit is incredibly steep and I wish I could say that I ran all the way to the top but I just didn't want to push it too hard today; I walked the last half mile to the top and then turned around. Only 2 weeks left until the race and I probably won't run to the top next week.

Easy slow pace on the way up and down: 9:15 overall pace w/ a couple of decent uphill miles some pretty fast downhill miles mixed in when I wasn't running alongside my son.