Posts Tagged ‘boston marathon’

Look up at your browser’s address bar.  Notice anything different?  No?  How about some missing hyphens in the URL.  Yessiree Bob, I finally got the domain name without dashes, woohoo!  That might be why, if you read this thing from a Reader, it looked like I had a million new posts over the weekend, the switchover meant changing everything from the old domain to the new.

The story of the name of this blog and the dashed domain is that I started posting on the Runners World Beginner Forum the same time I started learning to run in Feb 2007, picking Girl In Motion as my username.  So in November, when I started the blog, it made sense to use that name.  Wouldn’t you know, girlinmotion.com was already taken by a porno site, as I’m sure many of you discovered when trying to find this one.

Cut to about 2 months ago, I get a couple emails saying “girlinmotion.com is for sale for $1200″ to which my reply was “fuck you”.  I didn’t actually write it but it was mentally written the way my replies to spammers always are.

Then on Friday as I was coming home from my run (they’ve been hotbeds of ideas lately) and feeling wistful that I didn’t have that non-dashed name since I was starting all this action on the site and the dashes do leave a level of difficulty when saying the name “girl dash in dash motion dot com” and also, for searchers to find it naturally, those dashes are a hindrance.

Since a couple months had gone by since the coercion emails, I gave it a shot and put it into Godaddy to see if it was available.  YES!!!  Plus, I had a coupon, so I got two years of my brand new domain for $15 vs one year at $1200.  Happiness.

Bikini Ski

One of my readers is doing something pretty cool for charity.  Her sister-in-law suffers from Crohns Disease so to raise some dough, she’s going to ski in her bikini.  If she raises $1000, she’ll do two bikini ski runs.  Very clever and an entertaining way to help someone close to her.  So if you have a few bucks to spare, visit her blog Pedestrianrunner and throw a couple bucks her way.  Help her freeze her tush off for a great cause.

Friday’s MP Run

I finally did that 10w/8MP rearranged from last week.  It was a successful run, hit my paces without too much ado (MP miles 7:34, total avg 7:49) but I had a strange Boston thought on the cooldown mile home, that maybe I should pace someone instead of taking a chance on blowing up again.  Here’s what I posted to my friends in the sub 3:20 thread:

If the 3:20 doesn’t work (and there’s every chance that it won’t) I probably won’t be that far off my miserably gotten 3:33 so I won’t be too proud of the result anyway.  And if I make my goal easier by going for a 3:25 to begin with, again, not far enough off that crap 3:33 to matter and if that planned 3:25 goes awry, that’ll be really depressing.

So that’s what I’m thinking right now, not deciding either way but wanted to let you know what’s going on in this silly mind of mine.

A Snowy Sunday Long Run

Saturday was crazy, Philly got the 2nd biggest snowfall in its history (bumping December’s storm out) with 28.5″.  Here’s the photo I posted on Facebook, taken in the morning so there were still a few more inches to come.Yesterday was a 17 miler and while it was a bit treacherous getting to the park, they did a good enough job of clearing the paths so I was able to run without too much hopping around.  It was cold though, 22 with windchill so I wasn’t exactly feeling spry on the way home.  I think the cold keeps your muscles and tendons from being as pliable as they would be at normal temps, at least I know it’s true for tendons since that was a warning when I researched my ITBS, that it’s worse in the cold because it remains tighter so it must be so for all tendons.

And that’s it for Monday’s blahblah.   Have a great running week everybody and here’s a few smoochies for the road.

Glad to say, I’m truly happy to be training again.  I’ve been messing with the schedule, tweaking it like mad, but only by adding miles. I like the way the simple workouts look for now, so no edits for those aside from the mileage padding.  That might change as we get closer to the race because 6 or 8×800 (Yasso, hello) would probably be happier morphing into the same distances worth of 1200s or 1000s, but for now…all good.

This is what I’ve tentatively got on tap for the month of January. Here’s the original plan so you can see how it compares. I’ve entered on week 4.

What I've got planned plus what I've done up till Jan. 5th.

I took an extra day off on Sunday because it was 12 degrees windchill with 30mph winds and I was all, “screw this, training starts tomorrow!”  So that was my last day of  vacation.

Today’s run was 4 x 1/4 mi hill repeats, 9.4 miles total.  I had a great time doing them though it was cold and windy (21 windchill, admittedly not quite as bad as many of you have it).  The only crappy part was coming home and seeing the last time I did reps on that hill, I did 7 of them and was 30 seconds faster.  But it was 62 degrees that day and 3 weeks out from Philly.  Plus, I’ve been running easy for the last 6 weeks, so I’m fine with it.

I had a funny mini-freakout after I read Robert’s comment on the last post “Only three 20’s all training period?”  Suddenly, I was scrambling to add another 20, then I realized how silly it was.  There is nothing magical about a 19 vs. a 20 (if we lived in Europe, we’d be doing 30k Long Runs…18.4 miles) so for all intents and purposes, three 20s and a 19 make for 4 proper long runs.  Looks fine to me.  Besides, my lovely 22,22,24 and 20 for Philly didn’t even get put to the test since I started walking at mile 18.

More important to me is putting mid-long runs in there for general endurance.  Though ok, I penciled in a tentative extra 20 in there if the weather’s great and I feel like it, but probably not.

February at this point looks like 52 (cutback),63,69,73, then March will be 60 (cutback), 73, 54 (Shamrock Half), 74 and then April’s first week is 60, then taper.  I’ll still be messing around as it goes, but this gives you an idea of how I’ve modified the mileage.

On the Heart Rate front, it continues to be wonky, but I’ve now accepted it as a permanent part of the picture.  Instead of lamenting and comparing the past, I’m going to wear it but use the current readings as baseline.  As long as it shows natural  improvement with the passing weeks, everything’s A-OK.  The underlying quandary I’ve had has been whether to slow my runs down to make for a “better” HR.  But they’d end up being slower than last January when I was a much slower runner, so I’m using effort as the main guide and the monitor to note  trends.

That’s it for now, I’ll be back for more blather in a few days.  Have some fabulous runs!

Just got back from an ok run, 12.5 w/2X(4MP, 4:30 rec.).  Was ok, nothing amazing to report as far as effort or HR, plus I’m feeling like a teary, cranky mess thanks to Lady Time, so this hasn’t been my finest few days.

I took yesterday off for an unprecedented 2 days in a week, the reason was two-fold: the weather was sucking for the 2nd day in a row (high winds and rain) and I was supposed to do my MP miles in it, which wasn’t worth contemplating but also, my gut tells me that I need rest more than anything at this point – “the hay is in the barn” as they say, so taking that extra day off wasn’t a hard decision.

In other news, unbelievably, the Boston Marathon filled up yesterday…in November!  I am so glad I decided to sign up a couple weeks ago, thanks to my pals on the sub3:20 thread, because otherwise I’d be shit out of luck, which sadly, is the story for some of my dear forum friends.  To think so many people were waiting for Philly and CIM and a few other races about to happen, naturally assuming they’d have time to get their applications in – after all, last year it filled up early but that was in January!  So I’m only hoping that Boston will do as they did last year and reopen for a week so that those qualifying in the next few weeks get a chance to sign up.

OK, I’m done with this post, I need to be in a bad hormonal bitchy mood for awhile.  Talk amongst yourselves.  xoxoxo

Had a great interval session today.  Was a bit daunting on paper 10×1k@HM/10k, 1min rec’s, especially since most of you know I don’t take well to anything over, say…4 reps.  Kidding, but anything over 6 makes me nervous.  Surprise of surprises, I did this thing without a negative thought in my head (never happens).

The final story was 12.3 miles with the interval paces like this (some wind and small elevation difference explains the “every other”):
7:07,6:51,7:01,6:53,6:59,6:53,7:00,6:57,7:03,6:53…avg 6:57

I also inaugurated my marathon shoes that just came in the mail yesterday.  Fresh Elixirs! Purdy.

Backtracking the last few running days, Tuesday I had a nice MLR, 13.2@8:43.  Took two trips up my mile-long hill so felt very pleased with myself for that.  Then yesterday, I did my slowest recovery run of the cycle 8@9:57.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  The slower pace was two-fold, the hills the day before and also, my HR has been a bit elevated for a few weeks.

I’m not really worried about overtraining because I’m sleeping better than ever (new jackhammer quality earplugs) and I don’t feel irritable or dreading the runs, plus my HR went up near my May Half, so it doesn’t concern me hugely, but obviously it bothers me some.  So anyway, I want to make those slow runs really slow, especially as the mileage and workouts peak.

In other news, I signed up for Boston yesterday!   I was going to wait till after Philly but you can change your qualifying race after the fact and all the cool kids on the 3:20 thread were doing it, so…I did it!   I’ve had the room booked for awhile now (thanks to my Women’s BQ thread pals getting that over with months ago) so now all I’m lacking is an airplane ticket, which I’ll wait a bit longer to deal with.

Hope you’re all having some lovely runs out there.  Later, babies.