Hiatus

It has certainly been a while since I posted here.I've been doing mostly house stuff, so it made sense to update the house blog and not this one. However, I have also been doing some cool stuff aside from the house recently, so I wanted to mention that as well.

The biggest thing is that I ran my first Bolder Boulder on Monday. The race is 10K (6.2 mi) and I finished in about an hour and twelve minutes. Not as fast as I'd like, but I finished and that was my main goal. The strange thing, something I really didn't anticipate, was that I would end up running so much more than the race distance. Doyle (my running buddy for the race) and I both had our iPod Nike+ things set up to see how far we actually ran. Mine isn't calibrated properly, I think, but his was pretty good. His said that we had run 7.38 miles by the time we crossed the finish line, mine said more like 7.9 miles. Trusting his, that means we managed to add another 1.18 miles to our total distance over the course of the race. It seems like a lot, but if you add in all the diagonal and horizontal running we had to do to get around slower people and to get to the water stations and all, it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Counting just the race itself, we had a pace of about 11:30 minutes per mile. That's pretty slow and we were actually keeping up a good pace. If you count the 7.38 mile distance, we were running at about 9:40 minutes per mile, which feels a lot closer. That's easily the longest I've ever run at a stretch, and certainly the best pace I've maintained over time. Running outside just feels easier to me for some reason. I ran a mile about a week or two ago in a little over seven minutes. Doing that on the treadmill pretty much wore me out immediately. I'm not sure what it is, but it just seems easier to run faster and for longer times without getting tired. It may be that I was using a very slight incline on the treadmill so I was pretty much always running uphill and in the real world I'm running up, down, and on flat surfaces. Whatever it is, I just feel like I can run forever out on a trail. It's pretty exciting, especially since we have so many trails near our new house. I'm working up some trails at different distances based on various loops I can map out on Running Ahead with their course-building tool.

That's about it, really. Just trying to get myself back in the habit of running regularly. I'm also going to try to start mixing up my workouts. I'd like to be doing some cardio every day, so I may jump rope on my off days, and then maybe row once we get a rowing machine. Lifting needs to get in there too, so I'll figure out how best to fit that. Gotta keep making progress, right?