Random Banter

 It's been awhile but I wanted to get this out more for myself than anything.  This Sunday the 24th is my half marathon.  Starting off the year with this race.  I'm not considering it an A race by any stretch of the imagination.  It was more of a race that I was using to keep active through the winter.   On reflection I'm not sure it was the best idea.  My time might have been better spent doing some training and maybe pushing things a little more.  However I did run the longest I've run in a couple of years which I think is needed.  Having said that I didn't do anything that got me close to a half marathon distance. So Sunday will be interesting to see how it goes.   My goal is to try and run somewhere around 12:30 to 12 minute miles.  The one thing I have going for me is that this race is at a slightly lower elevation but not much. I'm fairly confident in this because on my last long run outside I was just just running fairly slowly and it was at a 11:55 pace.

 Today was the long run.  I wasn't sure what to expect on this but I was going to concentrate on keeping my heart rate low. And overall I think I did a pretty good job.  My intention was to run for 65 minutes but as I hit 65 minutes I was still feeling good and was still a bit away from home. So I ran for a few more minutes and went slightly over 70 minutes.  Which I'm really happy with.  At 55 minutes I picked it up a bit.  While I'm trying this slow running I think having some speed in there is important.  Lets call it a fast finish.  So I ran 10 minutes at a faster pace and then had 5 minutes cool down. Overall a great feeling and I'm excited to run again.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do this next week. Maybe some strides on Wednesday but we will see.  I have some vacation time so I might be able to do a bit more! Here's a screenshot of my long run. As you can see not super long and not a lot of power but I'm not worrying about that.  But the heart

 It's been a few days...a little over a month! I'd like to say that I've been doing something great but that's not the case. Here's what I think I've done in that time period.  I did the 5 days a week of running and found after a few weeks I just didn't have the desire to run anymore. So I cut it back to 4 days a week, which is what I've mostly been doing, and it's been good but I also feel like I haven't been running enough...LOL!   Last week I attempted to start up a Stryd half marathon training plan but also stopped that.  I did the first two days came down with something, not to bad thankfully, and just had no desire to continue it. Based on these two things I think it shouldn't surprise you that I find it really hard to run or find motivation this time of year.  So for now I'm just running.  More focusing on building that base...the aerobic base that is.  I still have plans to do the half marathon in late March, haven't signed up

Today was the day I had been thinking about for the past 5 weeks or so.  It was race day! My last race, to recap, was the trail race at the end of August.  It went well but I came out of that race kind of down due to expectations being set to high and it messed with my head a bit.  I did get over and it's helped me reframe how I think about racing. Racing shouldn't be worrying about what place you will get or even what time you should get (mainly for trails I've discovered) but should be about you versus the course. So that's how I went into this race.   As I mentioned in my post last week my critical power did go down but I thought that was a mistake.  However I thought about it all week and thought maybe it was correct.  On Monday I did a work out of 6 times 2 minutes with 1 minute recovery which was about half of what I had done the previous Monday and I have to say it felt relatively easy.  So heading into the race I told myself that I was going to and stay between

 I logged into the Stryd Powercenter yesterday after my long run to update my run with my thoughts and I noticed that my critical power, CP, had dropped.  It went from 322 to 312 (Stryd has a few bugs in their little graphs...they say it went from 325 to 312 but it was really 322!).  Which caused me to pause for a minute.  I should have known with running more on the treadmill and not doing any long hard runs that it would drop.  But after pausing for a moment I got it back together and told myself that I'd run what I had planned on running this next Saturday.   The race plan.  The Stryd race calculator says that I should race a 5K at about 319 watts and that will put me somewhere in at 27:37 which will not be lower than my summer 5K.  This might be subject to change but I think what I'll do it set my watch to run between 320 and 340 (Coros watches only do 10 watt increments).  My runs in the 330 area have felt really good.  I don't want to say easy because that hasn't

 I haven't posted here for a few weeks due to real life!  But I've been running and getting ready for this upcoming race in 2 weeks time.   Things have been going well...until recently.  I've been running 5 days a week and getting a couple of workouts in each week.  One workout is hard and the other isn't as hard.  However the last two times that I've run I haven't been feeling it.  Just felt kinda blah.  I got the runs done but on today's long run I cut it short by about 4 minutes and did not do any faster paced work which I've been doing on most of my long runs as of late.  I have a few theories as to why this might be the case.  Since I've started running 5 days a week my body hasn't caught up until now.  I've actually been gaining weight the last couple of weeks so I wonder if my body is under a lot more stress with this additional day or running.  So I've backed off trying to lose weight and am just going to try and maintain for a fe