Monday, January 3, 2011

Looooong Week

  So as you can tell there was some time in between this and my last post.  I guess I have some explaining to do.  As you know, I was able to rock out a 7 miler before Christmas since I knew I most likely would get caught up in family stuff and that work out time would be short.  Christmas weekend was fantastic.  I got tons of great Christmas presents, of which was some hard core workout gear.  One of the things I had been looking for now for a while was a light weight, warm, winter running jacket.  Thankfully, with the help of Renee ... my in laws were able to find a perfect one.  Its a black underarmor jacket that is light weight but really well insulated, wind resistant and warm.  In addition, I get a another underarmor cold gear shirt, a nike running hat and a set of nike running gloves.  With these additions, my winter running wardrobe is definitely complete!
  So as Christmas weekend was wrapping to a close I started to plan out my running schedule for the week.  I had hoped to run a 3.5 miler, a 5 miler, a day of cross training in the middle, and have the culmination of my week be an 8 mile long run.  Unfortunately, although it was a solid plan I got a little curve ball that through it off.  In addition to trading presents at Christmas, our families also decided to spread a stomach flu.  As my Sunday night shift came to a close I started to feel an upset stomach coming on.  In the next few hours, I was at home laying in bed with fevers, chills and muscle aches.  It turns out that nearly everyone at our family christmas ended up contracting a stomahc flu.  Although I was sick, I thankfully missed out on the vomiting part of the bug.  Overall, it took me a solid 3 days to recover from.  
   Being behind on three workouts, I really didn't know what to do.  Do I back up my schedule a little bit and skip a long run, or do I skip my mid range runs and just try to rock out the week's long run which would be an 8 miler.  Overall, since we were planning on going away for New Years Weekend with some friends, I thought the best thing to do would be to get the long run out of the way.
   So, on Friday Dec 31st, I set out for an 8 mile run.  Thankfully, it was sunny, 40 degrees and not all that windy.  I started out at my ideal long run pace of 10 min / mile.  After about a mile I was starting to have my doubts as to whether this run was going to be possible, I felt pretty tired ... like my cold may have knocked out more of my endurance than I thought.  I kept pushing through and ultimately got in a good groove.  I made it to ~6.25 miles (further than when I hit problems on my last long run) before I really had to take my first 1-2 minute walk.  All in all, the last 1.75 miles wasn't my best, but I ended up pushing through.  I hit 8 miles in ~1 hr 22 mins.  Not my best run by any stretch, but given my sickness earlier in the week I was just happy that I got it done.  

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