[Scratch]

I did the bench presses and chin ups yesterday, saw some progress over the effort from 6 days before.

I had a nice 3.5 mile fartlek run today, it was fun alternating between hard and easy sections of running. It felt good to run with a bit more speed, that always feels more like running than when you're just doing some easy miles which is the way I've been running most of the miles these past 3.5 weeks.

Tomorrow will be a complete rest day, then on Saturday I've got a 9 mile run to do and later on in the afternoon I'll do some standing overhead presses and barbell rows.

[Scratch]

I've gotten in some effort this weekend with variable reactions towards the 3 workouts.

Got up yesterday morning, much cooler, much less humid than prior weekends, thought I'd be able to see a nice jump in my easy pace on the long run. It didn't happen. I just kind of grinded it out, ran with a bit of extra pace for about a mile of it on the second half of the run when I saw another runner about a 1/4mile ahead of me and I worked on trying to catch up with him. Guess one positive thing that for whatever reason I did run better in the later miles than the early miles and I got 9.1 miles done yesterday.

Then yesterday afternoon I did the standing overhead presses and barbell rows, saw progress over the sets and reps from 6 days ago. That made me a bit happier

Used the foam roller last night. I just about wanted to cry when rolling out my calve muscles and quads. **** they hurt getting rolled out.

Got up today and set my sights on running 3.5 miles to get me to 20 miles for the week, my target for the week. For a bit of a change and something I want to work on this year in contrast to last year, I put some emphasis on the uphills. I ran the flats and downhills easy, but on uphills I would try to surge and accelerate some. Not a super amount of it today, just a gentle nudge of more effort to start using uphills to improve my leg strength and running form and hopefully pay off in some gains in speed eventually. Today's run went much better than yesterday which seemed weird, maybe the foam roller helped some.

I don't have anything scheduled for tomorrow but rest. Sounds good. Then it's on to next week with a bit more mileage and hopefully a 10 mile long run on the weekend.

[Scratch]

4.8 mile tempo run this morning. Some good stuff to it, some bad stuff to it. Good stuff was I hit my goal of running 30 minutes up at tempo pace, annoying stuff started when I woke up around 4 AM, checked my blood sugar and it was at 225 mg/dL after being at 118 mg/dL a little after midnight. I'm at a loss to explain that, my dinner wasn't anything super fatty last night and my numbers have been usually showing small drops overnight during that time period.

I do have enough instances of this sort of thing now where I can confidently say high overnight blood sugars will mean slower paced runs for me in the morning.

So that made the run a bit sour, but I should remember that I got up, I hit the important targets and that's all good.

[Scratch]

3 easy-paced recovery miles today.

I did some chin ups and bench pressing last evening.

Tomorrow I've got some hill repeats planned to run. Last year when I got ready for my first half-marathon, I was passive about hills, just get over'em, that was good enough for me. Now I want to use them to build up some more leg strength.

[Scratch]

Good workout this morning with the hill repeats. I started with a bit of warmup, then began running what amounts to a half-mile loop where for a section about .15 miles in length, I would be running hard uphill. My first time up that section took me 1:27, my slowest one would be the 4th time up in 1:29, then I ran the 6th one the hardest I could and did it in 1:25. So fairly consistent, I worked hard and came away from the workout feeling it pretty good in my legs. As well as my stomach a bit on the 6th repeat, got a little bit of nausea on that one at the end of it.

[Scratch]

10 miles for a long run today, it went much better than last week's long run. Legs felt pretty good, I didn't know how they would feel after I had run 3x during the week. So that's a good sign.

I did my sets of overhead presses and barbell rows after work yesterday, saw progress on both of those.

[Scratch]

It looks like I'm starting to see some improvements in pace now that I've got a good solid 5 weeks of running done. I'm cutting back on the miles of the previous 2 weeks this week, but will be trying to get some quality miles in and this morning I did that with a tempo run. Last week I spent about 30 minutes up at tempo pace, today I decided to try to run comfortably hard for about 10 minutes, take a short break, then run back over the tempo paced terrain on the way back which would be around 10 minutes again.

Now last week when I ran between a couple of marks, it took me 10:26 and my heart rate indicated I maybe had gone a bit too hard on it, averaging about 161 bpm during that time. Today I did it in 10:23 and an average heart rate of 154 bpm. It was also warmer and more humid today than last week -- I maybe would have liked to see my heart rate average be up between 155 and 160 bpm which is where I estimate my lactate threshold to be, but it was still good quality running during that time.

Last night was the bench pressing and chin ups, seeing progress with both. Tomorrow will be a total rest day, then Thursday morning I'll run a few hill repeats and do standing overhead presses and barbell rows in the evening.

[Scratch]

Good set of hill repeats this morning, made me feel like I'm seeing some very good signs of progress.

I only did 4 repeats this week because I'm cutting back some. Last week I did 6 hill repeats.

Today my times ranged from 1:20 to 1:24 on the repeats, last week my times ranged from 1:25 to 1:29. That's a big difference, although a second or two might be due to today's weather being much cooler and drier.

Best part was the mailbox sprint that I've been finishing all my runs at home with. On Tuesday I did it in 45.92, my best time ever. Today I found a whole new gear in my legs and sprinted that distance in 41.39 seconds.

I think I'm getting ready to make some good gains and improvements as a runner.

[Scratch]

5.5 mile run today, it was a good effort, came back faster on the back part of the out-and-back route. Stride felt a little off at times, but I'm not going to worry about that.

Tomorrow, I'm thinking of going to a high school track, and running a mile time trial there. I just want to get an idea of where I'm at right now and there are ways to use that time result to get a gauge on potential at the longer distances. I'm thinking I should be able to run a mile in under 8 minutes, but I don't know how far under that I can go. We'll see what happens.

Thursday evening I did standing overhead presses and barbell rows. Tomorrow some time I'll do the bench presses and chin ups.

[Scratch]

The mile time trial did not go as well as I hoped. I ran 4 laps, 1600 meters, in 8:10 so about 2 or 3 seconds more need to be added because there are about 1609 meters in a mile. The bench presses and chin ups later in the morning on Sunday went well though.

Rested yesterday, got up this morning to get a tempo run in. I ran about 5.25 miles total, spent around 30 minutes of it up at tempo pace/effort. It was one of my more disappointing sort of runs in a while, my legs didn't have much to them it seemed like, but that happens. If you work out, there are good workouts and bad workouts, and you just get through the bad ones so you can keep getting to the good ones too.

[Scratch]

Easy run yesterday morning, just 3 miles and its purpose was just to put more miles into the legs along with ramping up how often they can feel ready to run. Last year I got ready for the half-marathon with a schedule of 4 runs a week, this year I want to run 5 times a week on my hard build weeks and 4 times during recovery weeks. The principle is a bit like Pavel Tsatsouline's pointing out the importance of how the nervous system learns to coordinate the muscles and he's got strength training regimens that use almost daily workouts. You can probably transfer or borrow the same idea. But at the same time you always have to balance out how much fatigue the working out is causing, so when I'm in the Tuesday through Thursday part of the week I'm trying to see how it goes with moderately hard effort of tempo running on Tuesday, easy recovery jogging on Wednesday, then on Thursday's comes the hill workouts.

I ran 4.7 miles today with 7 hill repeats. On the 6th and 7th repeats I could feel form breaking down plus how it was becoming more of a strain to make each repeat solid and good. So I decided against doing the 8th as I had been planning. Still a good workout.

I did overhead presses and barbell rows yesterday after work, was disappointed with the numbers for the overhead presses. I'm going to see what happens the next time I do them and if it looks I've hit a threshold with how this training method is working, I figure it'll be time to switch over to something new and get the muscles jolted to something new.

[Scratch]

11 mile long run today, slow paced especially with the muggy humidity. I ran the second 5.5 miles about 5 or 6 minutes faster than the first 5.5 miles, did a good job of burning mostly fat for my fuel. My blood sugar was 125 mg/dL before starting, it was 134 mg/dL after halfway done, 114 mg/dL when I finished. No food was eaten prior or during the run.

[Scratch]

I registered this morning to run the half-marathon in Philadelphia on November 23. Assuming all goes well and I run it, I imagine it's going to be different some than last year. Last year my focus was on achieving it as a first time goal -- it was a lot of work and well worth it.

Now I know it can be done, the challenge is to remain motivated and repeat the persistence.

The squeeze of daylight hours is now meaning for some adjustments to the schedule. As of this week, I can still squeeze in shorter runs before getting ready to go to work, but for more extended workouts I have to start using the afternoons. That's happening today, I've got some hill repeats planned about a mile and a quarter away from where I live -- so that serves as time to warm up and cool down.

Today will be my 5th day of running in a row. Not sure what effect I will feel with that -- I ran long on Saturday, ran short and easy on Sunday, ran the 4-mile race on Monday at around my tempo pace with a few walk breaks interspersed, and ran easy yesterday morning. If today's hill workout goes awful, then I'll take tomorrow and Friday off to give my legs rest before the 12 miler on Saturday.

I'm already planning to make next week very easy and light, run on Wednesday, 5k race on Saturday, mile test on Sunday.

[Scratch]

Got the hill repeats done yesterday after work. It was gross, humid and hot. I trekked out to the hill, put a water bottle down in the shade of a tree by the road and got to work. First up one side of the hill, then go easy over the flat top and down the other side, go out a bit to marker at the bottom, turn around, take on the upslope hard and return to the tree with the water bottle. There I'd splash more water over my head, drink some, and head back again. I ran that hill loop 4 times for a total of 8 hard hill repeats, the one side usually took around 30 seconds, the other side would go for about 24 seconds.

I went back home, made dinner, and used the foam roller on my legs.

Then I got up this morning, squeezed in 3 miles before getting ready for work. Thus concludes 6 straight days of running. Tomorrow I rest.

[Scratch]

Sometimes I try to figure out what it is that keeps me coming back to doing workouts now over the last couple of years.

On Monday, I ran that 4-mile race at tempo pace mostly, some walk breaks, I didn't race it -- except for the end. Near the end there was another runner in front of me and I thought back to all those sprints I've been doing to finish off my runs. I made up my mind to try to catch him -- whether or not I caught him didn't matter too much, but it was to make the attempt, to put in the effort, to run as hard as I could and focus every bit of me into that.

It seems someone was taking photos as the runners were coming in and she managed to get a cool shot of me. It's just about the coolest photo of me I've ever seen.