So thankfully this week went by pretty quickly. As you can tell from my last entry, I had to do my long run on Monday due to some weekend slacking (and multiple xmas parties). The rest of the week seemed to fly by. I was able to get in a good 35 minute cardio workout on Tuesday at the gym. It was pretty much limited to the elliptical, but was a pretty good workout none the less. I have found there are two downsides to working out on the elliptical: 1 - After about 20 minutes my toes go numb. I think this is the result of leaning forward too much when I try to dig it out on the higher resistance levels. 2 - Its just boring. The rest of Tuesday was spent at Shattuck hospital working an overnight shift. Needless to say, Wednesday was a wash since I worked until about noon, wrapped presents and then slept all afternoon to recover.
Thus it brings us to Thursday. So, in an attempt to avoid the same mistakes that I made last week Renee and I decided to get our long runs for this week out of the way before the weekend hit since we knew that there would be about a 0.5% chance of us getting them done, at home, around our family, with all the celebrating and holiday cheer going on. Thankfully, the good news was that today I was able to sneak out of work early. Again, I through on my 10 lbs of cold running gear and headed out. Today's weather was kind of deceiving. The report said it was partly cloudy, high temp of 30-32, but gusts of wind from 20-30 mph. The one mistake I made today was I think I overdressed for the weather since during the run I found myself opening my sweatshirt and taking off my had and neck warmer at times.
Regardless, my run started out like any other. I started out a little bit too fast and had trouble finding a good pace. Like I have said before, for these long runs I aim for a pace of 10 min / mile that way I can get the distance in. My first mile or two I kept looking at my pace and I was around a 9:20, which I knew would hurt my endurance for a long run. I pretty much did the same route as Monday. East Broadway to the end of West Broadway, down W 1st to D Street, D Street to Summer, Summer down to South Station, South Station to the Seaport, Seaport back to Southie, E 1st to Castle Island, Castle Island to home. The run went well, for some reason not as well as my other long runs. I was doing fine up until about 4 miles when I had to take my first 90 second walk. I think my early pace is what got me into trouble here. After 90 seconds, I was able to bounce back in stride and was right on my goal pace of 9:50. I got to the 5.25 mile mark and this is where I crumped. I don't know if it was the fact that my previous long run was only 3 days earlier and I just didn't have the gas in the tank, but I ran into some problems here. Over the next 1.75 miles, I ended up walking 3 times for about 90 seconds each. It kept getting harder to start back up and get into a good rhythm. To add to the difficulty, the wind gusts near Castle Island was definitely closer to the 30 mph range ... against me. Needless to say, the thought of two days off celebrating xmas helped me gut it out. In the end, 7 miles completed in 1 hr 12 minutes. As always, not a record setting pace ... but I did it.
Now time to celebrate. Merry Christmas.
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