Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Longest Run Yet: The Old Horsetooth Half

It has been really hard to get back to my old routine after Little Miss' mishap, so this Sunday Davey and I got things going again! We are both pretty weak on hills, so we drove to Hughe's Stadium where the half-marathon starts to train on the huge hills the race has to offer. Basically, the first 2 miles of the race are uphill at a 6% and 9% grade (aka Monster Mountain), which is killer for any runner, let alone the two of us that aren't used to hills like that. It was pretty brutal, and I kept having to tell myself "You're almost there" in order to get up the hill. Once we were up the first big hill we were able to chug along pretty well and jut had one more hill (Dam Hill) along the dam. Then we came to a cross-road; either we could turn around and to all the hills in reverse (ugg!) or continue north and loop back around down Overland trail. The latter is what we decided to do and which put us following the path of what used to be the Horsetooth Half. In otherwords, we ran a half-marathon! Bingham Hill along the way was pretty hard, and so was the long straight run down Overland, but we did it! We clocked 2hrs 10min or running (we took some walk breaks) over what my car's odometer said to be 14 miles. It is good to train on the same hills that we will be running on race day. And if we keep running like this, we might not actually do too bad come race day!

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Getting Back to Normal

I ran Tuesday and today and I feel like I am finally getting back into the swing of running again. Tuesday I ran for 45 minutes and did alright. I am still recovering a bit from a cold and my breathing was tight, but I had a pretty good pace considering I hadn't ran in over a week. I took Wednesday off because I didn't want to push my self too much too soon. I think the rest was worth it because today's run went much better! I ran down to the park on Overland, ran around it, and back home through Rolland Moore park in about 54 minutes. The first time I ran that path it took me 60 minutes, so I am definitely approving and didn't lose too much ground. The plan for the rest of the week is to run tomorrow and maybe again on Sunday (I work Saturday and I'm on-call that night and on Sunday). By next week I want to get back to my normal training schedule and do a 2 hour run that weekend.

I am glad I am back to running. It really does make me feel so much better about myself. It is also very clearing for my mind and is a great way to release some stress. I am so glad I took up this sport!