In The Long Run

Easy run with the pup around Liberty Park.  The wood chips felt so good.  Only some slight quad soreness today.  Heading off to a Restore yoga class shortly.

Easy Liberty Park run on the wood chips with Nate and the hound.   Tons of people and pups out enjoying the beautiful weather.  

The Striders Running Blog has a video from the half marathon up.  I make an appearance about 1/3 of the way through near excited shirtless guy. I'm sure lots of other bloggers are in it, too.  

AM: Warmup, planks, lifting.  5-6 mile tempo run on tap for tonight.  

PM: Aborted workout.  Headed towards Liberty Park.  Hit one mile barely under 11 min/mile pace and I was struggling to even do that.  Legs really heavy, breathing labored, stomach sloshing. Decided that I needed the day off  and walked home. The walk was quite nice. Will do my tempo tomorrow instead and will run an easy 4-5 on Friday instead of taking the day off.  This should still be a good mileage week for me, I may even hit 50 if everything else goes according to plan.   

Warmup loop around Sugarhouse with Nate. It was fairly nice when we started. Then met up with the SLCTC group where I planned to do 5 miles at half marathon pace (8:41). The wind really picked up, the temperature dropped, and the rain started coming down.  I could only manage 8:58 pace.  Nate was freezing and so was I, so we skipped our planned cool down loop of the park.  My hands have finally thawed out, but I'm still so cold.   

I managed to find a brief window of sun to get my run in.  Usual short Liberty Park run.  I intended to do 10 miles today, but my legs weren't up for that.  After the run I went to yoga. It was a different teacher and ended up being a much different (and harder) class than I am used to.  

Easy Liberty Park run with the pup.  While it was warm and sunny out, the wind was fierce. The last 2+ miles home were directly into a headwind.  I had to work harder than I wanted just to maintain forward progress.   

This morning was supposed to be a 20 miler, but when I woke up to the rain I decided to swap this week's long run with next week's long run. My husband and I met some other runners super early down in Sandy. We logged about 11.5 miles on the trails of Dimple Dell.  I loved this, it's so nice to run in other areas. I had no idea that there were so many trails there. It was a bit muddy in spots, but such a great, runnable trail.  Soft, dirt single track, and wide wood chip paths. Tough to beat. I was really cold for the first hour or so until the rain finally stopped and the sun came out. 

Then I met up with the SLCTC group, changed into my road shoes, and did the final 5.5 miles on the paved Porter Rockwell trail. I felt surprisingly good for this last stretch and my pace was much faster than I expected. Given how good I felt, I probably should have just knocked out my 20 today. Oh well. Happy that I got a strong 17 in at least. 

PM: Yoga for flexibility.  This was hard, but I liked it. The instructor gave us all short head/neck/face massages during shavasana.  So relaxing.