Running in Columbus, GA

Last week’s long run just SUCKED so I was a little bit nervous about today. I promised myself that I would pay attention to eating etc on Thursday & Friday. And I did, pretty much. I ended up doing 14.5 pretty comfortably. The weather was nice - 55 degrees. The sun came up about 7 and it was just a great morning to get out there and do a long run. Really perfect conditions.

Instead of going south on the Riverwalk, we went south a little bit, then turned around and went north all the way to the marina and back down. The first big hill was at mile 6 and the second was at mile 7. I added 2 miles at the end to get my 14 in.

I’ll be at Below The Knee today from 10-6 and tomorrow from 1-5.

67° degrees this morning on my (early a.m.) run

I saw that Fountain City Coffee has added a location at The Landings on Airport Thruway!  I must be the last person in town to have that information.  I love their coffee, and they give a discount to all the Columbus Road Runners members. And they have a drive-through.

See?  If I hadn’t run that route this morning, I never would have known! I mentioned it to my daughter a few minutes ago, and she just rolled her eyes at me   Like I said…  I’m always the last to know anything.

I have my annual physical next week, so this morning I go in for the blood test and EKG. I haven’t had an EKG in over 20 years.

The 2 runners I know who’ve had physicals recently both have had heart issues… one got referred to a cardiologist, and I haven’t heard back from the other. Both are good runners and in shape.

I haven’t had a blood test or cholesterol screening in over 5 years, so I’m probably due. I am getting older, even though I don’t feel old.

The hardest part about today: No food or drink from midnight last night through the blood test this morning. So no coffee. Grrrrrr

Here are a couple of links:

• The Science of Sport
• The Long Green Line

Today is a rest day for me… so nothing new there today. Here’s the latest on the technology front:

• Phones/PDA: I’m using a Blackberry 8300 to monitor my blackberry enterprise server, and I just switched from a Treo 700P to a Samsung Blackjack windows mobile smartphone to monitor my Windows Sync Enterprise Server. My experience with the Blackjack so far has been great. Email is pushed to the phone by the WSES. Not much difference between the blackberry and the blackjack in terms of which one gets the emails first. So I traded my Blackberry Curve for the 8300, and I traded my Palm Treo for the Blackjack.

• Twitter: I use Twitterberry on the blackberry and TinyTwitter on the blackjack. Both are good but Websense filtering interferes w/ the blackberry occasionally   . After a couple of days using TinyTwitter, I prefer it over Twitterberry.

• I’m using Twhirl on my laptop as a Twitter client. I use Summize search a lot- it comes in very handy to search for real-time event information.

I did my 13 mile run this morning, and it wasn’t pretty. Quite the opposite. I bonked at about 8 miles.

I haven’t bonked in ages, mostly because I pay attention to my diet, hydration, salt intake and so forth.  So I ran to work Friday morning, no big deal. I didn’t eat much that day, since I had to run home. I ran home at 6, and it was 85°… got home,  ate 2 bagels, and promptly  (yes, I’m Mr  Excitement) fell asleep.

For today’s run I woke up, didn’t eat, just grabbed my stuff and headed out. Felt great the first 2-4 miles. By mile 5, I knew I was going to bonk. At mile 8… wow.

So no big deal. I’ll eat and recover and be ready for Monday morning - I’ve got an 8 mile run w/ 4 miles at marathon pace. Actually still trying to figure out what my marathon pace should be for these workouts. My last one was right at 4 hours, so I guess I’ll try to do the training runs at 8:30 or so, which is 30 seconds per mile faster.

I told myself earlier this week that I’d run to and from work at least one day. The way it worked out, that day was today. I left the house at 6:30 am, got to work about 7:15am, and by the time I took a shower and changed, I was basically at my desk by 7:30. Very lucky to have a shower at work! Traffic wasn’t too bad at all. Basically the same route I run at 5am except that I peeled off and headed for my office. 4.25 miles.
Coming home was much more of an ordeal, mainly due to cars and the traffic. I went a different, more hilly route, and it was 84 degrees when I started. Ended up with right at 5 miles. I can probably get used to it; I’m checking the map tonight to see if some of the shortcuts I saw would actually work.

Anyway, just as I got close to my home I took this photo of the dam at Lake Heath. What I should have photographed was the patch of poison oak I ran through a few minutes later.

I was up and out the door this morning early enough to run 10 miles and be home by 6am to wake everyone up. Just an easy run.
My daughter called about 2pm today, while I was at work, to tell me that our German Shepherd had swallowed a pine cone or something and was racing around inside the house. I drove home and found Molly (the dog, not the daughter) in the hallway, panting, with a big pinecone stuck to the roof of her mouth. She likes to chew on pinecones… but this one, I guess, didn’t break apart. The pinecone was stuck to her teeth, so I tugged on it until it came loose.  Before I left, I filled her water bowl with fresh water and she was pretty happy about that sudden change in her circumstances.

Tomorrow is a scheduled rest day, but I feel like doing something. We’ll see what happens.

Yeah, I know. I’m running down Veteran’s Parkway at 5am counting every time my left foot hits the ground. Why? Because it’s still drilled into my head that 54 paces = 100 meters. And I had to do 10 ea 100 meter strides this morning. I think it worked. So a big shout out to the Fort Benning Land Navigation Committee.
Was just thinking tonight that I’m using an 18-week training plan. 18×7 = 126 (I hope). Subtract the rest days and I’ll run somewhere around 90 times between now and August 31st. Including some 10 mile runs on Monday mornings, 14 mile runs on Wednesday mornings, and of course the long runs on Saturday mornings. Do I have a goal for the marathon? Not really. My goal is to arrive at the starting line injury-free, finish in around 4 hours, and have a good time. That’s it.

This morning I started off slow, got to my 4 mile turnaround, headed back and started doing the strides at about mile 6. I put the details in my training log.

Coming soon: Why you should join the Columbus Road Runners if you run 1200+ miles a year.

Got to run on the Riverwalk Saturday morning, 12.1 miles, long run pace. The place was a ghost town. Aside from the usual 6AM crowd I didn’t see anyone else.

The construction on the Riverwalk will continue until March 2009. I looked at coming back and can see where people have just beaten the fence down to run/walk the 50 yds or whatever across the dirt. I usually just get to the barrier fence, run up the hill, then follow the railroad tracks for about 100 yds until I can connect back to the Riverwalk. It’s not that big of a deal. The only bad part is that if you’re heading south on the Riverwalk, there are absolutely no signs or warnings or anything- you just come to a fence.

Sunday, I decided to run to and from Below The Knee. Pretty easy, since I only live a couple of miles away. I’m going to try to commute to my sysadmin job during the week next week. That’s about 4 miles away from home. I think I can do it Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Monday and Wednesday are actually long run days for me according to my training plan. I do 8 miles Monday morning and 10 miles Wednesday morning. Should be fun… the streets are pretty damn deserted at 4:30 am.

I really enjoyed the Mizuno Run with US gait analysis yesterday. The analysis part was very interesting and the takeaway was that I need to wear neutral shoes. Which I already knew… but wanted affirmation. I’ve had some arch pain for a few months and thought that maybe my leg alignment might be messed up. Anyway, the recommended Mizuno shoes were the Wave Rider and the Wave Creation. I’ve run in both and liked both. I have a pair of Wave Riders now that I run in occasionally- they belonged to my son but he thought they were about 1/2 a size too large, so I inherited them.

My running partner, Jack, ran in Asics Kayanos a couple of years ago, then went through a series of motion control shoes after that. He’s had nothing but trouble. Yesterday he walked away with a recommendation for neutral shoes, so he’s getting some Wave Riders. So for him, the event really helped a lot. Kudos to the Columbus Road Runners and to Dr Ed Lopez for bringing the Mizuno Run with US operation to Columbus.

Oh-  and thanks to the Mizuno team, and the regional Mizuno shoe rep, for spending some time with us. The guys doing the analysis were obviously serious runners who really knew their business.