Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Urban Safari

Today was 8 miles with 5x600m @ 5K pace. Right before we left I read Barb's post mentioning that there was only 2.5 weeks left to race day.

Gulp.

Scary enough, but I realized that I didn't have my shoes yet for the marathon. I have been running in a pair of Saucony's which have been fine, but I have never really loved them. I had been going back and forth with sticking with this style or going back to the Adrenaline stand bys. I remembered how good of a race I had in Indy wearing these shoes (and yes I am a little superstitious about those kinds of things) so I decided if I could find them in my size I would go that route. I called our favorite place, Running Away and to my delight that had a pair for both Jason and I. They said they would only hold them till the end of the day so we hopped in the car and drove over there. Our favorite guy, Tim, was working and we chatted a bit about shoes and why the tops of my feet get this really deep red mark on it when I run and why I was going back to the adrenaline. He gave us some socks, we grabed some tri-berry Gu and our shoes and we were on our way. We parked our car on Augusta and Ashland and started our run from there.

It was 2.8 miles to the track and I just felt....fine except that I am having some horrific shin pain. I am so used to this, but it's JUST.SO.ANNOYING. I feel like my entire lower leg gets really stiff and so I feel like I am running without moving my ankles at all (no heal to toe action).....if that makes any sense.

Since I am pretty sure that the track is a 400m track we decided to do 1.5 laps instead of letting Garmin figure the distance out because I think it has problems on the turns of the track. This worked out fine and our splits were :
  1. 2:23
  2. 2:43
  3. 2:41
  4. 2:43
  5. 2:38
The first one was too fast, but I was really happy with the consistancy of the last four. This was a total distance (according to Garmin) of 2.4 miles with the 200m recoverys we put in there in between the fast stuff.

We did the 2.8 back to the car for exactly 8 miles.

The run was a bit annoying because, although I realize that running down Chicago Ave, I am bound to get caught by some lights, tonight I got caught by every single one. It just got so annoying after awhile. I should leave later if I am running at night so at least if I miss the light, there would be less traffic.

Where does the safari come in?

As we were coming home, with about a half mile to go we were running by these apartments. All of a sudden a gigantic dog behind a fence barks like I am trying to come in and rob the place. It was so loud and so surprising and so close (just on the other side of a fence) that I jumped in the air and screamed! Then about .1 miles later we were running under a viaduct and pidgon was flapping around and scared me a bit too.

See, we city kids have wild life too.

Run Far Fast! (not for 3 weeks though!)

8 comments:

MNFirefly said...

Girlie, get yourself new shoes. It sounds like the pain that I had almost a month ago. And also go see OOSG (Mike) to get an adjustment - similar to the one I got in Monday's post.

ICE, ICE, ICE. Nice job the speed work.

Josh Dysart said...

Wow ... that is quiet the running adventure. Sorry about the shin pain; I know how annoying that can be.

Oh, and tri-berry Gu is one of my favorites!Have you had the new lime flavored Gu?

Thomas said...

You're leaving it a bit late for new shoes before a marathon, aren't you? Make sure they are well broken in before race day.

LeahC said...

I will start running in them next week and should have about 50 miles on them before race day. (last year there was as shoe disaster and I only had about 3 days on my new shoes)

Andrea said...

wow, you only had 200m for recovery? We did 400s :)

Good job, I look forward to hearing how the race goes!

LeahC said...

i think it was supposed to be 90 seconds.....but i didn't look at that and just walked about 100m, jogged about 100m and then started again. maybe it would have been better to jog 400.

Afternoon Tea With Oranges said...

Great job! That is so funny about the animals - I have had dogs to scare me so bad that I have screamed and scared the dog in return!

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm really behind on reading your blog.
Love the pics from 2 days ago.
Thanks for the link on tapering.
Keep up the great work - you two will kick butt on the 22nd.