Pace, Hills & Mud & Why I Still Hate Windows

Jason and I had another great weekend. This working hard during the week thing and really enjoying the weekends is great.

Friday night after we got home from hanging out with Jake and Laura at about one in the morning we were walking to our apartment and said, "Wow, someone is having quite the party!". Haha on us, the upstairs assholes were having some kind of giant shindig. We are pretty sure they were playing Dance Dance Revolution as they were pounding so loud that the glasses in the kitchen on our shelves were clinking. But we were exhausted and I refuse to be that old to go bitch about the party so we managed to fall asleep. We woke back up at about 3am and realized that they were having races. Running down the front stairs of the building, around the outside in the alley, then back up the back stairs. All the while some girl screaming, "GO GO GO". I LOVE OUR NEIGHBORS. So we are going to move since we are so tired of that shitty cheap apartment. We are hoping to move up slightly in price and get out that college loud riff-raff. So humbug on you and your stupid party.

Even with the late night we got up kind of early on Saturday morning. We cleaned the house and then went out for our 3 miles at race pace. I am so bad at these kinds of runs especially because I don't know what my goal pace is for this race. So we were running pretty hard I guess but comfortable and wondering why it was so difficult. When we finished, I looked at the watch stopped at 23:55 and realized why we probably felt so bad. SO I am thinking that 8min/mile is *not* going to be our pace for this race, so we really need to slow down those pace runs so that our legs will know the pace when we are racing. On Saturday night the lovely Lisa came over to play. We had dinner and then watched The Incredible's and then turned HBO on only to find that It Takes Two was on, which we proceeded to watch and laugh at.

We got to bed around 1:30 but it was up about 8 for a run with the Running Jayhawk. She had mentioned that if we wanted to get in some hill work to go to Waterfall Glenn. So we did and we took her along with us. We picked her up around 9:15 and then headed out west. This is a forest preserve that surrounds the Argonne National Laboratory. The paths are dirt and as all the snow has just melted it was really muddy. I was so worried about this run. I was thinking that we aren't in the best shape and now we are adding in hills (even though they aren't huge they are something compared to the flat ass lake front path) and muddy conditions. But off we went. I was *so* impressed with ourselves and I feel way better about the race after these splits :

Mile 1 : 9:12
Mile 2 : 9:02
Mile 3 : 8:48
Mile 4 : 8:41
Mile 5 : 8:41
Mile 6 : 8:37
Mile 7 : 8:22
Mile 8 : 7:57

Now I realize that this was only an 8 mile run and whatever, but I was really surprised at the comfort level of those middle miles. I told Jason that I think our natural pace is probably about an 8:40 and going slower just screws with our natural stride. I think he was singing the lyrics to "Crazy Bitch" in his head. But whatever, he knows he loves me.

So we have had to put Parallels on our computer at home for some work stuff for Jason. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to then try out the Sport Tracks program that I have been drooling over in my Mac land for the last few years. So I get it all downloaded and all the additional stupid PC programs it needs fine. Then I have the Garmin plugged in and then say ok, import from device. Of course I should have remembered that PC's are dumb and of course can't just recognize the device that is plugged in and of course, it needs some kind of software or something. I have a way to get files on the Mac part so I just downloaded it there and then shared the file and then I could import from a file instead of from a device and that seemed to workout pretty well.

Then I figured out the basics for the program and as I expected I was really impressed with all the functions. So I got it to do what I needed it to do and then I turned it off to get ready for bed. Then I thought it might have been nice to have the elevation plot as well as my pace graph to put in this post so you all could tell me how incredible I am. So I went back to the stupid program, reopened it. Oh....what's this. An error reading the log file? Oh ok. Perfect. So it seems that Sport Tracks can't read the history log file that I had created. Jason and I tried a bunch of stuff to no avail. So I'm back to where I started. I can either just keep Sport Tracks open all the time but that's not too safe to do with my running data. I don't really know how to fix it at this point either. I think it must be a parallels thing and not a windows thing because it doesn't seem like an error that a user should get.

I just was noticing how much of a pain it is to do anything with Windows. I have been a strictly Mac girl for about 6 years now (aside from work stuff which is done in a Unix environment) and just trying to do one simple thing almost sent me to the crazy house.

There is the one Mac software package called TrackRunner for Garmin stuff that works pretty well. I noticed a few errors last night when I tried to revert back to that and I don't think it's up to the Sport Tracks level (from what I saw for a few minutes). Although it *mostly* works and in the end that means a lot more than prettiness.

Alright, short week here because Jason gets Good Friday off....go figure.