Each Day Is a Gift

Birthday Tribute to Poh Poh

A beautiful Sunday to get together with family and celebrate my mother-in-law's 82nd birthday.  She is strong and healthy.  Widowed for over forty years, she raised four wonderful children and never ceased to impart her faith and wisdom to her posterity.  The unique thing about her is she always asks my husband what he ate.  She gets real upset if he's had soda pop or red meat.  To her, life is black and white, doing what's right is as natural as breathing.  She is a woman of childlike faith, without guile, leading a simple life of service and gratitude.  She follows a straight code of conduct, a healthy lifestyle, apparent influence of her father who was a doctor in China.  He passed away at the age of 99.  May she too live a long and useful life.  Happy Birthday mom, grandma, poh poh, bak bak!!!

21 Weeks to Boston '09

Spent most of morning pouring over my past running log, studying the 24/55 schedule and looking for my misplaced heart rate monitor.  According to P. Pfitzinger, I'm supposed to be in the Mesocycle 1 Endurance phase of training.  The last 7 weeks I've been running by feel and according to the constrain of time.  Today I want to see where my tempo pace is at.  According to McMillan my tempo run paces should be between 8:20 to 8:42.

The plan was to run the warm up miles westward where there are 3 miles of down and uphill running.  I would then run eastward on Bull River Rd for the middle miles which are rolling with no significant hills.  I want to see how many of the middle miles I could run at tempo pace.  Then I would run the last westward miles to cruise home. 

Everything looked good on paper; but I'm terrible at finding my pace.  I had to glance at my Garmin mid-mile to see what my pace was.  I would get distracted or lazy. 

Here goes:  I ran 8 miles in 1:10:15.  Average pace:  8:46.  HR:  176.  Splits:  8:46, 8:46, 9:34, 8:35, 8:33, 8:48, 8:20, 8:48. 

Looking at the splits I don't think I was doing the tempo run right.  It looks more like a steady-state run.  O well, at least I got her done.  Except for a slight tightness on the right calf during the last mile, legs felt fine.  Perhaps yoga tonight would help.  I will work on focus, and sustain a 8:30 pace for 4 miles next time.

Woke up with slight stiffness (didn't do yoga last night), arthritis at 4 (cool temp).  So glad today was supposed to be a 5 mi recovery run.  According to McMillan, my recovery paces range from: 1) Recovery Jogs (10:40 -11:10) 2) Long Runs (9:40 - 10:40) 3) Easy Runs (9:40 -10:10). 

Here goes:  I ran 6 miles instead of 5 miles.  The Garmin beeped a low lap memory alert at mile 3, so I stopped to delete some laps and misjudged the distance and ended up running an extra mile. Time: 57:43  Averge pace: 9:37  Splits:  10:05, 9:33, 8:58 (oops, got carried away), 9:48, 9:33, 9:44.  Man, my splits are all over the place.  See what I mean?  I'm terrible at finding my pace.  Will keep working on that. 

Note to self:  I was doing a good job at rotating my shoes until after SGM.  I don't know why.  So today I wore the smaller sz 6 which I hadn't worn for 6 months and probably had 250 miles.  I want to start the new year with my new shoes which have been sitting and waiting in my closet for 3 months.  Something to look forward to.

AM/PM Yoga - that felt so good!

General Aerobic run today.  According to Pfitzinger, these runs (10 miles or less at steady pace) are intended to enhance overal aerobic conditioning through boosting the training volume.  Because many of the beneficial adaptations that improve endurance are related to the total volume of your training.  OK, I'll take his words for it. 

T. was in the low 30's, partial sunny sky with no wind.  Wore l/s shirt, tights, gloves, shed the light jacket once Wendy left me at mile 4.  Mile 5.5 to mile 7 has an uphill with an ascent of 150'.  I kept the effort even on the uphill. 

Easy 9 miles in 1:30.  Average pace: 10:00.  Split: 10:39, 10:00, 10:12, 10:10, 9:57, 9:30, 10:10, 9:47, 9:20.

Busy cleaning and shopping today.  Jeff's flying in this afternoon.  Taking the family to the Jazz game tonight.  Cooking and traveling to Gunnison tomorrow, no running for me.  Happy Thanksgiving to you all.  Good luck for those running a Turkey Trot.

Went to bed very late last night.  Dragged my tired self out of bed to cook.  I was so jealous that my out of town son got to run the Earn Your Turkey 4 mile race with his friend in Orem.   Thought about Mark and Dale running their Turkey Trot this AM.  Didn't have time to even eat breakfast, big mistake.

Got to Gunnison safely.  Was good to see all the families and two new babies.   I was so hungry by 1 pm that I ate three heaping plates of food, Chinese and Japanese specialty dishes with the token turkey, dressing, ham, yam and all the trimmings.

After the feast we had a wonderful Thanksgiving program, music, singing, tribute to the grandmas and grandpas.  Then all those who are young and able went on this bicycle cross-country-obstacle-course race.  It was all fun.

Got home in the evening and stayed up till midnight to watch 2 movies. 

Went to bed very very late.  Slept in till 7:30 am.  Ate a quick breakfast and hit the stores with hubby and two sons.  Looked at some sporting equipments.  The boys got some jeans and shirts.  In the afternoon I went grocery shopping and bought stuff for my missionary son in Brazil.  Didn't run a single step.  Will do some core workouts.  Look forward to running on the trail with some bloggers tomorrow morning.

Kelli worked her magic again today!

You'd think it was race morning or something.  I was so excited for this run, I woke up at 5 am.   I hadn't run for two days and ate so much over Thanksgiving that I was ready for a nice long run with great friends.  There were about 15 of Kelli's friends there.  What an awesome bunch of runners.  I got to hang with Kelli, her gym instructor and Rachel & Lucy (Rachel's dog) the first 5 miles going north and UP.  Thanks to Kelli, there was a cooler full of bottled water for us at the turn around.  My legs felt pretty good so decided to test them out on the downhill.  I figured the girls would soon follow.  I also wanted to run a few miles at marathon pace.  I soon caught up within 100 yards of two of the boys.  I can't recall their names (Erico & Jose?). When we got back to the parking lot, KellieS was kind enough to run with me for 4 more miles.  It's amazing how fast the miles go by when you're chatting away.  About half of us got back to the finish where sweet Kelli had a spread of muffins, juice and drinks.  KELLI, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ORGANIZING THIS RUN, and for the "aid stations" and breakfast after.  YOU ARE THE BEST!!!  I hope we get to do this again.

14 miles in 2:13:45.  Average pace: 9:33.  HR: 160.  Splits: 9:50, 9:34, 9:32, 10:25, 10:08, 9:25, 9:15, 9:24, 9:25, 9:33, 9:30, 9:20, 9:13, 9:00. 

An interesting afternoon:

My sweet hubby wanted to take me shopping for outfits for the holiday parties.  I wanted to stop by Wasatch Running Center to pick up my Grand Slam hat.  I bought a pair of CW-X tight at 50% off, sweet.  Then we went to the South Town Mall.  As we entered Dilliard's from the parking lot, we saw a young lady (late teens or 20's) getting out with another lady (like her mother) in a wheelchair.  I held the inside door open while my hubby held the outside door for them.  They politely said many thank you's.  No sooner had they exited the outside door, a security guard was charging down the store isle towards the doors.  He ran past me, nearly knocked my hubby over, with a woman security guard right behind.  They grabbed the girl by her arm.  The mother tried to flee from the wheel chair but tripped and fell at the curb.  Other shoppers coming from the parking lot were all concerned and so was I until my husband said:  "We just aided and abated the escape of those two shop-lifters."  Sure enough, the security guy pulled out the hidden loots from the wheel chair.  I have never witness a theft bust before.  It was kinda scary and exciting. I later learned from the store clerks that mothers had used their baby strollers to hide stolen goods.  What horrible example to their children.  How sad!!!

After that nice morning run and afternoon shopping, I was too tired to cook.  We took the family to Chuck-a-Rama.  It was Thanksgiving feast all over again.  I ate TOO MUCH.  When's our long run again?