The weekly wrap

The last 2 weeks will be remembered as the time when I rediscovered the joy (and the agony) of running hills. My little neck of the woods is littered with hills. Short steep ones, long, gradual ones and everything in between. As my mileage is starting to pick up, I’m able to incorporate more of these monsters in my runs, which hurt like hell at the time, but I know it’ll pay dividends in the future. I just wish I could run up them without ever having to run back down the steep ones. Coming down is pretty rough on the knees.

I did my first 5 mile run of the training cycle this morning. It was a terrific run. No fear and doubt this week. The weather was cool, humidity was low and after a mile or two my body really fell into a rhythm and I was cruising. The only down side to the run came around the third mile, when I came around the corner into a wall of smoke. The first time I passed by I thought it was someone trying to skirt the burn ban, burning leaves at a time of the day that not too many would notice, but as I passed back by about 5 minutes later it was pretty clear that if that was the case, it wasn’t being controlled properly. The fire wasn’t raging or anything, but I was glad some guy in a truck had stopped to call for help, otherwise I was going to have to cut the run short and make the call myself because it had definitely spread some.

This is one of those days that I’m feeling encouraged again. Maybe I am still a distance runner. Sweet!

On the weight front, after 4 months of steady, week-after-week loss, this is the first week that I don’t seem to have lost any weight. I’ve held steady at 182-ish since last weekend. I think that’s OK. I knew I was slipping and being a little too liberal with my eating. I haven’t been eating much bad stuff, but I’ve been allowing myself to have a snack in the evenings (the rationale being that I have to run at 4:30am, I might as well have some fuel in the tank), so I think I’ll need to cut that out.

That’s really it. Next week is the same training regimen. strength/3.5mi/2mi/3.5mi+strength/5mi/cross.

I’m really kind of looking forward to that 2 mile run going away. That’s not enough time to get warmed up, so it never stops hurting. I’ve been trying to do it in 14 minutes, but so far I haven’t made it. The closest I got was 14:30. I blame the hills. Damn hills!