Monthly Archives: May 2003

Running: 7 miles

Start time: 5/31/03, 7:00am

Location: W&OD Trail

Activity: Running

Distance: 7 miles

Run:Walk ratio: 3:1

Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Another week, another progress report… big thanks this week to my grandmother Ruth Spinelli, who became my latest donor while I was up visiting her in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Thanks so very much!

It’s amazing how a bad week can radically change someone’s attitude. If you’d asked me how I was feeling about this year’s training yesterday, the truth is that I wasn’t feeling terribly positive about it. After last Saturday’s run, sitting in a car for four hours was not one of the best things I could’ve done for my legs. By the time we arrived in Pennsylvania my calves were feeling stiff and sore, something they shouldn’t have been doing after just a six-miler. Even worse, I wasn’t able to shake the soreness; I went running on Monday evening after I got back home, and I had to quit halfway through because it felt like I hadn’t run in years.

All week long, I was trying to loosen up my legs and get back up to speed, with both crosstraining and just plain old walking. Add in strange shifting weather patterns and my joints were hurting on and off with no rhyme or reason. (Bizarrely, so were Julie’s, making us decide that it was the fault of the weather.) Even as late as Friday night, though, I wasn’t feeling good about it all. I was quietly thinking to myself that if this kept up, I’d have to seriously re-evaluate my decision to do the marathon this year.

So this morning when the alarm went off at 5am, I was not in the most pleasant of moods. I hauled myself to the run site, we split into two smaller groups, and headed out into the (thankfully not very hot) humidity… and a funny thing happened. Everything seemed to finally snap back into place. I didn’t have any problems at all with my legs or any body part. Maybe all I needed was a nice long run to finally get back to speed, but the seven-miler flew by really quickly, and our group (me, Julie, Asha, Lindsay, and Mary) did a great job of hitting all of our time goals.

Needless to say, I’ve made sure to keep everything moving today since then, and so far so good. Sometimes, it seems, all you have to do is not give up and it’ll all work out in the end.

Running: 1.5 miles

Start time: 5/26/03, 6:30pm
Location: Local neighborhood
Activity: Running
Distance: 1.5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Well, I don’t know if it was because of sitting in the car for four hours on the way up to Pennsylvania on Saturday and then four more on the way back today, or something completely different, but my calves were positively screaming at me when I tried to go running today. I mean, it was pretty bad; I finally cut it short and even then my pace slowed to a crawl. Which, in retrospect, meant I was going too fast early on for it to have evened out as much as it did. Bleah. I better not be getting shin splints again… *sigh*

Running: 6 miles

Start time: 5/24/03, 8:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Activity: Running
Distance: 6 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Well, it’s only been a week and it’s still hard to believe I’m doing this again! Big thanks to my first donors for this year, Esther Friesner and Julie Babyak, both who sent donations in before I’d even gotten my butt in gear to start soliciting any! Wow!

I was feeling a little sore after last week’s run (a lethargic winter will do that to you) so I took it easy this week; the near-continual rain and gloom may have had something to do with that as well. Before I knew it, though, it was already Saturday morning and time to head back onto the running trail!

Our group was pretty large this early on in the game, so the staff asked us to at least temporarily split into two groups. Madelyn took one group, while I ended up taking the other. It felt like old times to have a nice small group again, although I suspect we won’t stay split for too long. People always drop out of the program, or shift to different pace groups early on. For now, though, this split should work pretty well.

Our last 8am start time until October (yikes) greeted us with cool temperatures and cloudy weather; it kept threatening to rain, but never actually did so. Probably because I brought a hat. Our group did pretty well with staying on pace, something that’s often tough to do this early on! It seems like a really nice group of people.

And now, I’m off to Western Pennsylvania to visit relatives over Memorial Day weekend. I hope everyone else enjoys the day off (if they get one)…

Running: 5 miles

Start time: 5/17/03, 8:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Activity: Running
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

If you’d asked me all winter long, my running plans for this year were set in stone. Run the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in August, then train through that fall and winter to do the Mardi Gras Marathon at the end of February. (Not, thankfully, during Mardi Gras itself.) But with the coming of spring began longings… to run a full marathon in 2003… to be able to train for a marathon with shorts instead of sweatpants… and to tackle the Marine Corps Marathon one more time and see if the second time through I could do even better.

So in the end, after a lot of debate, my friend Julie and I signed up to do the AIDS Marathon summer program one more time. Right now we’re definitely going to still run the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in August, as well as the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October. We may still do the Mardi Gras program afterwards, or another early 2004 race to take its place (a little voice on the West Coast keeps whispering “Long Beach Marathon” to me), but we’ll see.

We missed the first two weeks of this program, so we decided to jump right in with everyone else the third week. We’d run some smaller races this spring so we knew how our speed was looking, and since we had just done a 3-miler two weeks ago anyway, we figured we were ready for a 5-miler this Saturday. What was especially nice is that we had two people that’d we’d run with before in our group; Madelyn, who we’d run with in 2001 and 2002, is in the 14:00 group, and also there is John, who we ran with in 2001. It always makes such a big difference to have a familiar face or two waiting!

We had a much larger group this year—last year’s group only had six people (and on any given weekend someone was always missing!), but this week there were no less than twelve. I suspect our numbers will dwindle with time, but for now it was an interesting experience trying to keep so many people together. We unfortunately only had eight in the group by the time we finished; two runners were having some leg problems and turned around early, and John and someone else slowed down a little bit because the cold, yucky weather was playing havoc with John’s breathing.

By the time we were done running, though, it felt really good to be back up in the swing of things. I was feeling a little hesitant all week about this, but by the time we left I knew we’d made the right decision. It should be a fun six months!

Running: 2.5 miles

Start time: 5/14/03, 9:30am
Location: Local neighborhood
Activity: Running
Distance: 2.5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 13:25min/mile

While still trying to decide my training plans, I figured I should try out what would be my new run:walk ratio. If I’m going to be in the 14:00min/mile group, that means I should be training at a 3:1, instead of my old pace of a 3:2 (for 14:30min/mile).

Phew. I knew I did the first loop way too fast, something I am all too familiar with doing when out on my own. Especially at a new pace, I have a tendency to blast through my run cycles and then collapse in a heap before too long. (Especially since with switching from 3:2 to 3:1, my running speed should actually be slower than before, if you think about it.) So when halfway through my second loop I had to walk a little extra, I felt emotionally crushed, even though logically I knew that this was because of the far-too-fast earlier speed. In the end, with an extra two minutes of walking in the second loop I still ended up just over half-a-minute per mile too fast overall. Yeesh. (Even with the temporary crash, the second half clocked in exactly at a 14:00min/mile. Waaaay too fast in the first half.)

So now I’m still in “furnace mode” even after a nice cold shower. As soon as my body temperature drops a little lower, off to work I go…

Running: 5K (3.1 miles)

Start time: 5/4/03, 9:30am
Location: Downtown Washington DC
Activity: Running
Distance: 3.1 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:2
Average pace: 13:10min/mile

Lesse. In the last update, I mentioned going running Wednesday morning. Well, I must have done something wrong then because I had an achy left calf for Wednesday evening, Thursday, and Friday. (On Thursday night my friend Steve even commented on me limping, which I hadn’t conciously been doing.) When I woke up Saturday morning, my calf was still hurting. Unfortunately, I’d already promised Martha and Kimberly that I’d do the MayDay 5K with them and Julie; it benefits a paralysis foundation, one of the recipients being a friend of theirs who was hit by a car while training for AIDSRide and is now wheelchair bound for life. I felt really, really bad about not not doing this, but the idea of hurting my calf more kept guilt from pushing me into doing it. (I’ve learned the hard way to not run on an injury.)

However, by Saturday evening it was feeling completely normal, so I ended up running in the Brain Tumor Society 5K with the ladies this morning instead. (Julie’s sister is a brain tumor survivor, so it meant a lot for her to have others come.) The run itself went really well—I was hoping for an under-40 minutes time and tried to hustle a bit in the last quarter mile to hit that mark (leaving the others behind—sorry about that!) but by my watch missed it by about 50 seconds. Oh well. My overall pace was still pretty good and I’m not complaining! Nice crisp, cool weather helped it being a pretty enjoyable experience.