Start time: 06/29/05, 6:00pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:52min/mile

Not really sure what went wrong here. Well, “wrong” isn’t perhaps the best word but by no means up to our usuals in my book. I think it was that second mile where we looked at the watch and it said 11:15… oops. Oh well! Other than that, not too bad, although Julie really needs to remember to 1) take her allergy medicine, and 2) wash off her makeup before we leave the office. Oops. Sweat plus mascara can’t feel pleasant. *shudder*

Oh yeah! Final tallly for June 2005: 76 miles. Woohoo! (By way of comparison, June 2004 was 59.5 miles, and June 2001 was 45 miles. Oh, how I’ve come.)

Start time: 06/27/05, 6:00pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:27min/mile

Phew! Very hot. Headed out with Julie and Mark, and then two miles in Julie’s knee still was feeling a little stiff so she turned around early so she could take it slower on the way back. Mark and I kept trucking along another half mile to the turn around and then headed back. Even with a water stop we made some really good time, but I felt absolutely drenched afterwards, to put it mildly. Still, I’m happy with the end results, even if the last mile speeding up happened in part because I slowed down to scoot over as a bicycle passed us, and when I started speeding up to catch Mark, he thought I was in a “must speed up wildly at the end” maneuver and started speeding up. Meanwhile, I was still trying to just catch him. Oops.

I think the humidity melted our brains.

Start time: 06/20/05, 6:00pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:50min/mile

That’s our excuse and we’re sticking to it. Julie had eaten, like, half a cheesecake while in Texas on business last week. (Her excuse: Everything’s bigger in Texas.) I’d eaten my body weight in wedding food. And Mark ate a packet of peanut M&Ms while at the movies. (Ok, one of these things is not like the others.) Still, very consistant mile splits despite having not really sped up much as planned. No real complaints. Looking very forward to speed training in two weeks.

Start time: 06/15/05, 6:00pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:44min/mile

Mark and I hoofed it on the trail again yesterday, and it was almost startling how much of a difference just a little less humidity made. Same temperature, but it felt a lot better. More importantly, we didn’t have that horrible “dragging” sensation as time went on, staying pretty strong. (Except for that bleeding nipples part that I mentioned elsewhere.) Much happier with my performance for Wednesday. I think it helped that we didn’t start out nearly as fast, so there was less distance with which to go splat.

Speed training starts two weeks from Saturday! Yay!

Start time: 06/09/05, 6:00pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:00min/mile

It was just me, today; Julie was stuck at work and Mark is getting over a cold. The first mile I took a little fast (9:27), but by mile 2 (10:10) I settled into a good groove… and more importantly, kept it (10:00, 10:08, 10:14) despite the rain that started coming down right as I hit the turn-around point. (Naturally.) I hit my 5-mile point at exactly 50:00 and I’m quite pleased with that. Even better, I didn’t feel like a complete and utter idiot running in a sleeveless top that I got at Target. (So many brands of exercise gear have ludicrous looking sleeveless shirts; do I really need to have armhole slits that go down to my waist? It just makes me look like a hobo at best, or a shapeless blob of fabric at worst.) Who knew that Champion’s C9 line would not only have a good sleeveless shirt but that it would also be the cheapest by far? Yay for cheapest.

Start time: 06/01/05, 6:10pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:47min/mile

A slightly late start this evening; I got trapped on a conference call at work, but fortunately Mark and Julie were nice enough to wait for me. Mark was feeling a little creaky (he made up on Monday the 7-miler he missed from the weekend, but ran it too fast) and Julie had banged her ankle against the coffee table pretty hard last night, so we took it at a comfortable pace. Even then, we still maintained a nice beat and I can see improvement in everyone in the group—especially Julie, who’s definitely more used to the ratio and the speed. Next week I think we’ll start really buckling down on getting our three-person group runs into a little faster pace overall.

Start time: 05/30/05, 1:00pm
Location: Local Neighborhood
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:01min/mile

It’s bee a while since I went running in my own neighborhood—my weekday runs have been on the W&OD Trail as of late, but being Memorial Day and all my normal group’s plans were in flux, so I figured I’d give the old 1.25-mile loop a few spins. I’d forgotten how annoying it is to have to wait for traffic (which I got zapped on the second and third loops, waiting a good twenty seconds each time for cars who’d gotten a green turn arrow to all pull through). More importantly, I ended up having my old friend “stitch-in-side” show up for about half of the run. I think I really need to pay more attention to my breathing; I focused on deep inhaling and exhaling and it was completely gone, so it’s good to know there’s an easy solution, at least.

And, as an added bonus, it was nice to hit my old “5-in-50” finishing time with the new ratio. (Well, technically five miles in 50:06, but close enough.) It’s taken me a little bit of getting used to but I seem to have finally found my way with it. Even better, this closes out May with the most milage for a month all year… heck, the most milage I’ve had in May ever, a total of 61.3 miles. Yay!

(Mile-and-a-quarter splits: 12:03, 12:43, 12:46, 12:32. Since the second and third loops had both the stitch and the traffic, I’m not complaining!)

Start time: 05/26/05, 5:45pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:42min/mile

After wussing out on Tuesday (“It’s too cold, and raining; I might melt and then catch a cold.”) it was back to the trail for the Greg/Julie/Mark trio. Took the first mile way fast, but I rather liked that. It’s definitely starting to get warmer again, although popping outside an hour ago made me think that when it gets hot enough to no longer warrant “after work” runs, I might shift into some evening runs. I know that I should hit them in the morning, get the metabolism up and blasting for the rest of the day… but there’s something so wonderful about a cool summer evening. We’ll see.

Very much looking forward to July’s speed training, I must say.

Start time: 05/18/05, 5:45pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:45min/mile

So, in the second episode of Farscape (“I, E.T.”) the episode opens with an alarm going off on Moya that broadcast so loudly it kept making Crichton’s face twitch, and one of his eyes kept squinting shut over and over again as part of the side-effect?

Yeah, that was me this afternoon while we were out running. It wasn’t because of sun in my eyes—I’ve been pretty good lately and have been wearing my prescription sunglasses on the maintenance runs because of the position of the sun this time of day—but because I was sweating like a crazy man, and all that salty gunk kept running into my eyes. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. It was really gross, and there was me without my “long run wash cloth” that I sometimes have with me in July and August. I’d say I must have looked like a big ol’ freak, but that’s nothing new, and wearing the same Cherry Blossom 10-miler shirt as Mark just really compounded it all. (At least Julie wasn’t wearing hers, too!)

But on a happier note, it was otherwise a very good run. First and last miles were both at 10:30, the middle three were all 11:00-on-the-dot or slightly under. This ratio is slowly starting to feel like home, yay! (Although for the 10K this Sunday I will no doubt use my tried-and-true 4:1 ratio that served me well for the Sallie Mae 10K. If I tackle the Capitol Hill classic smartly—start off at a 10:30 pace for the first mile, then be up to a 9:30 by mile three, and knock another full minute off by mile five, I’ll get that elusive under-59:59 that has my name on it.)

Start time: 05/16/05, 5:45pm
Location: W&OD Trail
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 5:1
Average pace: 10:55min/mile

Julie and I did another “after work” run, and despite a slow second mile we still ended up with an acceptable average. So much was just chatter about this and that, but towards the end we were talking about the real difference between this time last year and this year in our running. Last year was ultimately “playing it safe”, and while neither of us regret the decision we made in terms of pace, it feels really fantastic to be going at a pace more in line with what we should be aiming for. “It feels really good,” Julie said at one point, “to just feel like at the end of a run cycle I’ve really moved down the trail.” It’s so true. It’s, in many ways, what was missing last year. Thankfully we had The World’s Best Pace Group(TM) that more than made up for it, and as the season grew to a close last year my maitenance runs had picked up enough speed that going that much slower than what I was capable of on the weekends helped too… but both of us are so much happier with what we’re doing now.

Like I said, no regrets about training choices in 2004—after the disaster that was 2003 I really needed a confidence-builder, if nothing else—but it’s more satisfying now.