Back on the roads and free GU

What did you do last week? I ran 40 miles! Normally that's not very big news. After not really running for three weeks though because I was sick, this is big news! This week is also off to a great start. It's Tuesday and I've already logged 18 miles!

Last Monday I got out for a solo 7 mile run. I wasn't sure how it would go for the first couple miles, but realized I just needed to shake the dust off and then everything went well. Tuesday I met some friends for an easy 8.5 mile run. In shorts. And a t-shirt. Completely happy. I took Wednesday and Thursday off and then met my buddy Jonathon for 8 miles before work on Friday. Even though I still fight to get out from under the covers at 4 AM, I still love the morning run during and after.

Saturday Morning I met up with the Beyond training group for the weekend long run. I usually run with the 7:30 pace group which usually ends up running 7:00/ miles but since this was my longest run in three weeks I decided to run withe the 8:00 group instead. We ended up running a hilly and windy 16 miles with a 7:48 average. It was an out and back run. The out had a lot of up hills. The back was mostly into the wind.The run went well and it was great to catch up with friends over coffee and breakfast afterwards.


Saturday's run





I took Sunday off and then last night I managed to get a nice ten miler in after work inbetween tornado warnings and thunderstorms. Siren? What siren? I was going to run at 6 o'clock but it was pouring rain. Like hard. I love a good run in the rain on a hot summer day, but not so much right after gettin over a cold. I checked the radar and realized that there looked to be about an hour of no rain starting at 6:30. Perfect. I headed out as soon as I saw a break in the droplets. When I started running I was heading directly toward the next bank of storm clouds and they were headin my direction. When I reached the halfway point I'm pretty sure I was right on the edge of the storm. The clouds were like a wall of darkness inching closer and blotting out the little bit of daylight that remained. Now I was running the same direction as the storm for the next two miles and when I look at my garmin chart I see those two miles were my fastest. Apparently my subconcious didn't want me to get wet either. I managed to stay on the edge of the storm the whole way home and within five minutes of walking through the door, I heard the heavinly showers begin to pour.



Out running the weather

This morning I was up before the sun again to knock out 8 miles with Jonathon. We were flying the second half of today's run. We did an out and back and on the way out it was mostly down hill and with the wind. The way back was the total opposite Jonathon is wicked fast and has been putting in 100+ mile weeks lately training for Ultras this spring and summer. Saturday he ran an unofficial  3:10 marathon at 4 AM by himself before going to work and he followed that up with 13 miles on Sunday. He's slightly crazy. This morning I was struggling to keep up with him for the last mile. The kid is a machine. I looked at my daily mile leaderboard on Sunday and he had 75 more miles than the next highest of my friends on there! It was kind of funny this morning though. There was a good chance I was going to oversleep. I set two alarms on my phone last night, one for 4:05 and one for 4:10. I woke up for the 4:10 alarm. I wasn't sure if I slept right through the 4:05 or if it just didn't go off, because that tends to happen from time to time. I found out at 4:05 this afternoon why it didn't go off this morning. I set it for PM instead of AM....oopsie. Good thing I didn't get them both wrong! After my run I polished off a delicious french toast bagel sandwich from Panera and after seeing the oatmeal that B.O.B.  posted this morning from there though, I think I'm going to have to try that next time. Maybe both...

So that's been my running for the past week and a half. I'm really happy to be back out there putting one foot in front of the other again. Just in time too because I've got the Kal-Haven Trail Co-ed relay coming up a week from Saturday. I'm still not sure which leg I'll run. The trail used to be a railroad track way back in the day so its pretty straight and basically flat. Well sort of. The first leg is a gradual downhill and is just shy of 18 miles long. The second leg is gradually uphill and 15.6ish? miles long. The problem is my partner has been fighting an injury the last month. I got a message from her Saturday saying she ran 12 miles and it went well but she's down to an 8 minute pace and gave me her "blessing to replace her" if I have someone faster who wants her spot. Now I'm not the type of person to just drop her because she's not as fast currently as she was when we signed up for the race so I didn't even think of that. Granted if she wasn't injured we would have a very good shot at competing to win the co-ed division (she's crazy fast and faster than me) and that would be awesome, but it's not the end of the world if we don't. I told her it's up to her. If she still wants to run it with me she can, I don't want her to feel like she has too either because I wasn't sure how far she had been running lately and I don't want her to push herself too hard too soon just to run this race. She reassured me that if I wanted to get a new partner she wouldn't feel betrayed. So right now she is still my partner, and I'm excited for the race. It goes from Kalamazoo to South Haven (right on Lake Michigan) and a couple that runs with us has a condo out there and they are nice enough to be throwing a post race party for all of us.

Oh and last but not least, do you use Strava.com to track your runs? I'd never heard of it until someone told me about a contest they're doing right now sponsored by GU. I already have enough ways of tracking my mileage but the fact that I can get some free GU out of it was enough reason for me to join up. The basic idea of the contest is this...You upload your runs from your smartphone, garmin or other gps device for a month from March 9th - April 9th and if you log 100 miles (manual entries don't count they must be gps tracked) you get 8 free peanut butter flavored GU packets. Log 150 and you get 8 free Roctane GU packets. Log 200 miles and you get a 24 pack of assorted GU. If everyone cumulatively logs 100,000 miles during the month then everyone gets a sweet discount at GU.com! Pretty sweet deal so if you're interested check it out here

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