Some unexpected gains

Well, I recently went and did my run with my heart rate monitor on.  At a sub-7:30 pace my heartrate was steady at 174-175, which is well within my maintainable range.  If you are a Joe Friel addict like I am, then it would be about the top end of my zone three.  This is pretty accurate since I know my LT (lactate threshold) to be around the low 180s and the corresponding row on the chart lists it at 182.  What is really exciting is that I was formerly running about a nine minute mile pace at this heart rate, so my cardiovascular system has made some wonderful adaptations over time.  I guess that is the upside to leaving the monitor at home for a few months then plugging back in, the gains are noticable.  Alas, I am still hounded by the tighness in my calves.  It normally only hits on saturday (I know what you are thinking; no, I didn’t go out drinking the friday night before!) when I am due for my long run.  I think it is a warm-up issue, so I plan on biking for a 30 minute warmup before leaving to go run.  I also think it has something to do with progressive overload, so I will be rearranging my days a bit.  Tuesday will now be my middle distance run (six miles), wednesday will be my short run (three miles), and saturdays will be my long run and lift day (nine miles).  This is more along the hard/easy/hard pattern.  Next week I won’t lift unless everything else feels really good with the bike as warmup.

Also, an unexpected gain occurred on the bike.  Where I previously held a heartrate of 145 I now held about 122 on the same chainring-cog set.  It took at least two cogs higher to get the same heartrate, so that is a definite improvement.  Four weeks to race!  My goal right now is to just have my running plan straight by then, without this inhibiting muscle soreness.  I also plan on being in the pool once a week and doing my warm-up rides.  Other than that, just trying to get quality training time in the pool and on the run, since those fit much more easily into my school schedule.

Happy Singles Awareness Day!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the one day out of the year that is devoted to all of you single people in the world!  Today you will find many couples which will go out of their way to show you how lucky you are to be alone in this world.  Couples are out buying cakes and chocolate, getting fat because of all the sugar and the insulin response; as a single you don’t have to worry about any extra poundage this February 14th!  Couples will be out destroying trees as they buy copious amounts of cards, while you can sit comfortably certain that you have helped ensure a clean and safe environment for your children.  You won’t have to spend any money on flowers or stuffed animals which will just die anyway or end up taking up space on the back of a shelf somewhere in a closet.  Don’t even get me started on how dangerous it could be keeping those mylar baloons around candles!

So I want all you single folk to head on over to www.cowboymouth.com and find a way to listen to “(Not) The Love of my Life”.  If you can find the live version, you will hear drummer Fred LeBlanc as he tells a couple hundred folks to “imagine the person in your life who hurt you the most, male, female, or otherwise; and smile your @55 off, because they are NOT THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE ANYMORE!!”

If you see any of those couples out eating dinner at your favorite restaurant, I want you to sit back, smile as you realize that they are doing all of this for you, and do something totally crazy to draw all the attention to yourself.  Then bask in the fact that you don’t have to share the spotlight (or the back seat of the cop car) with anybody else!

Man, I am ready for a Race!!!

Now I Understand Vacations

I once had a professor named Elbin Cleveland.  The first day of class he had this wonderful speech about how he didn’t believe in tests, how he couldn’t fathom going through his whole life, arriving at the pearly gates, and then being asked by St. Peter “Okay, Elbin, are you ready for your test now?”  He went on to say that while he did not believe in tests that the University as a whole certainly believed in them and that he was required to give a few, so things did not work out quite as well as they could have.  Now personally the actual tests don’t bother me too much, but I can certainly empathize with the people who just do  not take tests well, since our grades are pretty much solely determined by them.

So I don’t stress the tests, but I was sitting in my living room today after taking one, staring out the window blankly, when it hit me that I need a vacation.  Why?  I don’t worry too much about tests and am less stressed than most people in my class, so why would I need a vacation when I am just really getting into the groove of things?  About this time I realized that sitting two feet to my right is my desk calander which has every assignment for the next three months planned out on it, and just to the left of that is my Skills Checklist book, open to the pages I need to review.  I come in here (my bedroom) to type this post, and as I sit in front of the laptop my Care Plan software and Abnormal Psychology Case Study CD ROM are constantly in view.  I have a list of common medications to research sitting on my bed, beside  my list of personal things to do like go to the bank.  It really did make me smile, realizing that the answer to “Why do I feel like I need a vacation?” was right in front of me, no matter where I looked. 

Now, by definition a vacation is a period of time away from home or business in travel or recreation.  So I have to get away from home or business, business being school and since my home is full of business I guess I have to get away from home.  For the travel or recreation part I know it can’t be too far, and certainly not too long, with a busy schedule.

So I am going to go somewhere else, to do some things that I enjoy, where I am in control of things and can focus on myself and let everything else go for a little while; and I need to pack light, where are my gym shoes?

I am such a slacker

Well, the first round of exams is over with at the University, and the results may not have been wonderful but they were certainly passable.  Have I mentioned that this semester has been really frustrating for some reason?  I can’t really place what it is, however.  It seems like it might be a general feeling of disorder; the University accepted many more students into the program than they normally do and as a result have had to do some adjusting and it seems like everybody is not quite on the same page.  If you know me personally, you know that I am a very organized person; so, it has been a bit hard to just let some of the chaos slide off and roll with it.

I was getting so swamped, I had been cutting back and cutting back on training, but I finally had to just decide that “to hell with it, knowledge won’t do me any good if I wither away and can’t use it.”  So the run training has been coming back with a vengeance.  I have run seven miles at a 7:30 pace without any serious pain afterwards.  My calves hurt progressively less through the last few weeks as I slowly built the distance up.  Then I made a mistake (of course, have you all seen the recurring theme yet?) and in a rush I neglected stretching well before and after my seven mile day.  It did not hurt then or the next day, but when I tried to run at pace again on Saturday they really started cramping and it became tight and painful.  I had no spring in my stride, so I cut it short.

 Whenever I can train, I have to put everything else away and get psyched up to get to the gym.  Whenever I have a few rest days that I know I am supposed to take easy, I can’t think of anything else but getting out and getting faster again.

 Ready to run on Tuesday, well stretched and rested, and see where I am.

 I also found a wonderful exercise program to prevent common injuries from swimming.  The link is http://www.brownpt.com/PDF/exercisessr2.pdf

I will be trying this out. I have always had a very slight but constant pain in my right shoulder, and now it has gone away with this off season so I plan on keeping it away!

Good Night All

Things are either getting better or they are broken

So I was running today, doing my new hold a fast pace and extend from there.  I was running along rather uncomfortably at about a 7:30 mile pace, when I was about three miles in and the pain just stopped.  I guess I warmed up the legs and the calf muscles finally loosened up, but I was definitely glad they did!  My shoulder had started cramping up, and that went away after my stride loosened up.  Have been lifting with a focus on the calves, trying to get them built up a little quicker to handle the new pace.  An 8 minute mile pace would cut thirty minutes off of my half marathon run, which is what I want to be able to do in a Half Iron distance race by the end of the season (end of September).

Of course, this whole college thing is trying to throw a kind into my plans, which is why I had to revamp my training plan in the first place.  I had been happy plodding along nice and slow, knowing I could run for two and a half hours straight and knowing that I was slowly, almost imperceptably, getting faster each week.  But no, the University says, “You must attend class every day, often waking up before the sun rise just to make it to class, and then you must devote the rest of your day to reading and doing homework.  Oh, and you must also give us your soul.”  It’s actually written in the handbook, right after Section 3: Immunizations is Section 4: Functional Ownership of your Soul.

Anyways.  I am about to go rest the soul for a while, then wake up and take a psych exam.  Fun! If I ever have time, I plan on adding a little side bar that has something like “On my Mp3 player” and putting up the songs I am currently addicted to.  If I can figure it out, I would love to have some short snippets of them run in the background, of as you click on them.  If course, I don’t think I’m that computer savvy, so.