Weekly Running Update 4-30-07

Ahh, here we are. Back on schedule. Familiarity truly is the king of comfort is it not? I know you're all excited for the update but please try to control yourself lest I find it impossible to finish this post through the deafening roars and jeers cheers. Ok, my running update is back to its usually scheduled time and place, which is nice. Things have gone completely upside down the past couple of weeks for reasons that are already well documented so we'll leave that alone. Let's just be glad they're starting settling back into a well worn groove. So, without further ado and much pomp and circumstance, I present the week that was in the world of running, Calitri style.

It felt good to get back into the swing of running. I was pretty depressed two week ago when I couldn't running because of the blister incident. Being sidelined for the week, after sticking to the schedule so religiously for a month, annoyed me like fingernails on a chalkboard. It felt like all the hard work I had put in up to that point was all for not. I was a train that had traveled a hundred miles only to be derailed halfway to the next station. My shipment was never going to be delivered. I was afraid, knowing how I work and think, that I wouldn't be able to pick back up after the boil on my foot healed. Luckily, I'm pleased to report that I got back up on that horse, or rail if you prefer, without much of a problem at all. She didn't buck hard enough this time to push me into unrecoverable paralyzing despair and sloth.

Tuesday was a get back in the swing of things four miler that flew by without a hitch. I was pushing myself, trying to run out the frustrations of the previous week and I finished in a fairly respectable time of around 24 minutes. For those of you keeping track at home, that's six minute miles. Pretty fast if I do say so myself. I'm not looking to go much faster than that. Although, if it happens I'm not going to complain. My dad - no he's not a bear despite what you might have heard - was telling me about a guy he ran cross-county with in high school who would finish his distance run each practice with a five minute mile around the track. If you've ever ran a mile on the track, you'd know five minutes is a damn fast time. World record caliber is just under 4 minutes for the mile runners. I ran the mile during indoor track my senior year of high school and my best time was 4:52. I only ran one race and afterwards told my coach I never wanted to run that fucking race again. Sixteen times around a little circle in a big room is damn boring. Plus, I'm not one who's fluent in pace. In fact, I was the oblivious rabbit in that race. I took off, thinking for the first half of the race that everyone else was either really slow or that I was really fast. As you may have guess, they all caught and passed me and I ended up dragging my dead and lifeless body across the finish line in last for that heat.

Wednesday, given my aforementioned suckiness at pacing, I decided to work on form and pace over a six mile run. The shorter runs, 3 to 5 miles, I just flat out run as fast as I can while maintain some semblance of constancy. On the longer runs I want to run in a similar manner as the marathon. So Wednesday was the first trial in this series of experiments and everything worked out even better than I could have imagined. I finished up averaging about 7 minutes a mile and I kept that pace throughout the run. Something I was especially proud of. No breaks on the downhills or easing up on the uphills for this guy. Nope, just a constant beat straight on till Sunday. I also worked on sitting back in my gate to more effectively use the larger muscles groups in my legs, i.e. the quads and glutes, and take some of the strain off my calves. I'm convinced that if anything's going to hold me back on race day, it's going to be my calf straining or cramping up. Therefore, I'm really trying to strengthen up now and get used to running techniques that emphasis other muscles groups. I hoping the old adage, the bigger the muscle the more work it can do, holds up. Maybe that's not really an old adage but I makes sense to me. Prove me wrong if you dare. I have no actually evidence to back up my intuitions.

Thursday was just your normal, everyday four mile run. Nothing too special here to talk about. I did kill a deer with my bare (bear) hands while jogging a path through the woods behind my house. It was self defense, I swear. That damn thing came out of no where.

I took the rest of the week off following that. I didn't want to extend myself too far considering I had missed the previous week. However, I did get a lot of cross-training done in the mean time. Friday was soccer and then all day Saturday was golf. Both activities made me sore as hell but I'm sore all the time anyway. Should I have stretched after golf? Who stretches on there way back to the club house? I'll tell you who, the gays and Ted Kennedy. But seriously, when you wake up and your legs feel like they took the opposite of Advil during the night, why not pile on the neck, back, arms and abs? I couldn't feel any worse could I? Don't answer that. I already know. I finished up the weekend with a little manly yard work. I took the broken lawn mower apart, fixed it and put it back together. It runs now but something's still not right. It sits there and oscillates between very low and very high RPMs. A constant mind-numbing up and down. I'm not going to give up on it, though. I'm a mechanical engineer damn it and I did not go to college for four years learning to design jet engines to not be able to fix a fucking lawn mower. In the unlikely event that I can't fix it, I'm going to set it on fire with the rest of the gas and dance around it like a good little piggy from Lord of the Flies.

I'm back at it tomorrow, so wish me luck. Just when these walking sticks attached to my torso start to feel better it's time to go punish them again. I hope they're up for a beating.