Running

In case any of you don't know, I love to run. Why? you may ask. There are a lot of reasons. I just enjoy it. It is something I can go to that will relieve stress and give me a break from everything else. I can forget about life, or I can think about life while I am running. A lot of the time I listen to my favorite music. Sometimes I will think of nothing but the next mile or half mile and how fast I should run it. Running is also very healthy. My heart and lungs are in good shape.

Yesterday I decided to do a tempo run. For those who don't know that is a run anywhere from three or four miles up to 10 miles or longer that is a quicker pace than a normal easy jog, but not quite as fast as you would run a race. It had been three or four weeks since I had done one of these tempo runs and my body needed the speed. After the first mile I decided to do the next three or four miles at a sub-8 pace. The next four miles ranged from 7:44 to 7:13. My legs felt fatigued after mile three. I realized that my legs were still trying to recover from last weeks 54 miles and last Saturday's 26.5 miles. I also did eight miles on Monday. I guess my legs just wanted a rest. I think today will be a short easy run. I will probably only do five miles at a nine minute per mile pace.

It is funny to look back at my running log over the last six or seven months. Last summer I barely ran at all. It wasn't until October when I started running again seriously. At that time it was a chore to run three miles. I notice in my log that I even called a five mile run a "long" run. That is pretty funny considering the fact that I have now been calling my ten mile runs "easy" as apposed to "long." If you click here you can see a graph of my runs over the last eight months. It is pretty cool to see the progress I've made. I think maybe it is time for me to stop building miles for now. I'll try to maintain 50-55 miles per week with the long run of 26miles, for at least a few weeks. I'll work on doing more speed stuff. I'll probably just do a tempo run. Maybe I should do some hills in there too. Maybe in three or four weeks I'll start building mile by mile to 31 miles. My plan is to run 31 miles on July 5th. The 50 miler being three weeks later on July 26th.

All this talk about running makes me want to go running.