Posts Tagged ‘music’

This was supposed to be another easy run after yesterday’s mid-Long (11mi @ 8:32), but the weather was gorgeous today: sunny and 61 degrees, albeit still gusty.  Tomorrow’s supposed to be rainy and cooler, so today won.

Hudson had 3x10min @ Half/10k pace with 2min. recoveries, but dividing it up into three small parcels seemed “eh”, so I did this instead: 2 mile wu, 3mi@Half pace, 2min rec, 1.5mi@10k pace, 4miles home.

It went fine.  I wish I’d reigned it in better on the Half portion and kept it to 7:17s, because it convolutes my HR comparison to last week’s tempo, but I overcompensated for the wind.  Splits were 7:17, 7:13, 7:14 (avg. 7:14, Avg HRR 85%) , 2min recovery, 6:58, 3:28 (avg. 6:57, Avg HRR 89.5%).

Total for the run: 10.5 miles, avg pace 8:05.

Been having a weird thing with my left index finger these past few days.  It’ll twitch for a few seconds, then slow down and stop.   Of course, I stupidly looked up what it could be and discovered that Michael J. Fox’s first sign of Parkinsons was a twitching pinkie, but I’m not even going there.   It is mildy freaky though.

Other than that, I downloaded a lot of songs this week.   Of all the singles in my music collection, The Killers win for Most Songs From One Band because I just loooove their hooks and Spaceman is my new favorite sing-along.  Then there’s Manchester Orchestra’s I’ve Got Friends with that super swell chorus and the always uber-cool Dandy Warhols with Godless – excellent trumpet line.  A bunch more, too but that’s it for now.

I’m not a religious person at all, although when Nick told his friend recently that running is my religion, I had to agree that it is the closest I’ve ever come to having one.  Even so, without a deity in my belief system, I still admit wholeheartedly to believing in miracles.

This week’s Airbus landing in the Hudson River with no fatalities was so jaw-droppingly unbelievable, it most certainly qualified as miraculous.  I kept tearing up when I saw the thing on TV, especially yesterday a passenger being interviewed said something to the effect of, “You know how they tell you to put your head between your legs?  We didn’t.  Most of us looked straight ahead so we could see exactly how we were going to die.”  Jeez, if that doesn’t rip the heart right out of you, nothing will.

I had a miracle yesterday.  Nothing in the comparable realm of serious or life-affirming events, but definitely an unexpected occurrence that seemed to defy the laws of science and nature.

While searching for something in my desk drawer, I noticed my long-dead Ipod Shuffle.  Nick got it for me soon after I started running, in 2007.  That summer I sweated so much, it killed the thing.

A couple days after it died, still deep in denial, I tried one of the “fixes” I’d found online.  Immerse it in a glass of water to let the salt deposits dissolve.  Of course, you’re supposed to do this immediately after it dies before the innards crust over and this was days after, so it didn’t work.  I did have a moment of hope though, when my vegetative iPod’s light turned on, but it was just a tease, the thing was indeed broken.

Soon after, I bought myself a different clip-on mp3 player by Creative, which is still working great, despite an even sweatier summer.  It has annoyances though: playlists aren’t as easy as the Shuffle, if you want to hear the songs in a particular order, you have to use a program that renames the songs on the actual device and also, there’s a tiny wheel for fastforwarding that ends up doing other functions if you inadvertently press it, which you can’t help but do since the wheel’s so miniscule.

So I’m looking at the Shuffle in my drawer, and the fact that it’s even in my drawer and not in some landfill is Miracle #1.  I’m not a hoarder, I prefer living with the least possible crap, and if it hadn’t been for Nick’s inscription on the thing, I would have thrown it out the moment it died. But there it was, looking up at me in all it’s cuteness.

On my desk, recently purchased, is a bottle of electrical contact cleaner.  It’s great for twitchy headphone jacks and noisy pots (knobs) on mixing boards, etc.  So without even a Hail Mary, I squirt contact cleaner into my little blue Shuffle, connect the USB dock and PRAISE BE! as easy as that…I had lift-off!  The Shuffle came back to life.  It’s a miracle, I tell you.

I only wish we’d had such luck with our beloved Canon Powershot camera last month.  The lens suddenly stopped retracting and the pervading advice on the internet was “throw it down or bang it against something…really, it works!”  Unfortunately, heeding this advice, we broke it completely.  We now own a newer model Powershot.

Enough miracle gadget talk though, yesterday’s run was incredible.  Coldest so far, windchill averaging 8 degrees.  Getting dressed was amusing, after all, it’s hard to gauge your first time for a new temp and while I could have used a neck gaiter for my chin, all in all, I dressed well.

The Schuylkill River (how I’d love, just once, not have to look up the spelling of the river I run on every damn day) was frozen in large swaths, with small islands of water surrounded by ice.  I’d never seen it like that before so it was pretty special.  I’d planned on 7 but it was so sunny and lovely, I went 8, averaging 8:40.

Today I’m going out for 8 and then tomorrow (day 14 of my mini-streak) I’m set for 12.  This’ll put me at my highest mileage week to date: 59.25 miles.  Depending on how I feel on Monday, I might keep going with the streak, I don’t have a real reason to end it – nothing hurts and I’m not tired, but that may change after Sunday’s run, so we shall see.

Have a wonderful weekend and (however tiny or goofy) may you find a miraculous happening of your own.

Before I begin today’s festivities, I have a little tech rave for the Garmin folks, so skip this paragraph if you don’t use one.  SportTracks users: check out this incredible weather plugin, found thanks to a RW poster in the Gear forum.  It gives the weather at the start and end of your run as well as an average.  Ditto with wind (even calculates headwind/tailwind), wind chill and a few other great tidbits to help log your run.

So I took Friday off, did a short 6 with 8 strides Saturday, and then yesterday had a fantastic 9-miler. The weather was gorgeous – 45 degrees, and I guess the day off with the previous day’s strides energized me, because my usual training pace (about 8:50/mi) went on holiday.  I was moving along comfortably at  8:23s, 8:20s, feeling as if it was a normal everyday run.

What makes it even more gratifying is to look back one year ago, to November 18th when I ran the Philly Half Marathon.  My race pace that day was 8:28 and I was sucking air bigtime.   That’s progress.

Backtracking to my last entry,  I have an interesting addition regarding my mention of the supposed “10 days for speedwork to create its adaptions”.  Jim posted a comment questioning it so I started looking for evidence and, save for a passing mention in Glover’s book, couldn’t find anything, just memories of times I’d read it.  So I posed the question in the RW Training forum.

Thanks to one member, whose opinion I respect on all things physiological, I think it just may be an old wives tale, as he said there’s no way to test such a single session and he’s asked numerous sources about the subject.  Well good!  I like doing a light speed session on race week, so now I won’t have to feel guilty about it or think I’m just appeasing my brain…it probably does help!

So today’s the day for said speed session.  I’ll be getting to it in about an hour because it’s going to be stupidly warm today, low 60s, so no time to waste.  I’ll probably be doing 6 x 1/4 mile at 5K pace.  It was between that or Daniels’ race week 4×1200 at threshold pace but in the end, race pace sounds more enticing.

Lastly, on the subject of speed workouts, I wonder if my regularity on doing intervals and tempos weekly for the last few weeks is the reason my thighs are getting bigger.  I haven’t gained any weight, but damn, my jeans are getting pretty tight around that area.  I don’t even mind it really, they look good (and Nick keeps telling me so) but it is interesting that the body keeps changing.  Maybe now I can use them as a weapon, ala Bladerunner.

I’ll close here with a couple songs that contributed to my wonderful run yesterday, one of which is a free download for December.   Keane’s The Lovers Are Losing is gorgeous (as usual, disregard plotless video, enjoy beautiful song) and the freebie is Let It Rain by Living Things – great chorus.  Just right-click the download link to “save as” then go buy a gel with the money you saved.

Sending super speedy lovin’ vibes today to Jim, Jackie, Barb, Joe, Ilona and Ron.   Between CIM, Tucson and Ron’s charity 40miler to honor his cousin, I want you folks to know I’m super proud of all of you.  Jim, you better be remembering every little thing because I’m going to want full details.  I know I’ll get everybody else’s dirt on the forums.

As for me, I just completed a super windy 6, which brings me to 50 miles for the week.  It’s a good level for me, so here’s hoping 2009 lets it continue, uninterrupted.

Guess it’s time to do something productive because neither Tucson or CIM have tracking.  How’s a girl supposed to concentrate with all this marathon madness going on?  The injustice of it all.

I’ll leave you with my latest fave running song, Sex Is On Fire by Kings of Leon.

Backtracking first…

Monday’s 7 w/3 mile tempo ended up being a fabu run; molasses start on the first tempo mile (7:57) but the next two miles (7:38, 7:36) made up for the initial sludge.  A new song on the mp3 player, “Let It Rock” got me pumped so much, I rewound it for the whole 3 miles worth.

Yesterday had its ups and downs.  On the downs, remember my wonderful dentist appt the other day?  The cleaning was great, I had stellar hygiene, but a couple cleanings ago, my regular hygienist Patty (who had become a friend and partner in crime) was fired or quit.  “Partner in crime” because for a couple years, before the doc would come in to check me out, she’d whisper “he’s going to tell you replace this filling but don’t worry about it yet, you can wait on it”.

It was a huge old filling, but it hadn’t given me any trouble and I loved that she was my renegade hygenist.  When she left, I was assigned a chipper company girl in her place.  She’s very nice and all, but now there’s no one to tell me to ignore the doc, so I finally gave in to the pressure and got Step One of a crown yesterday.  The shit costs $868.  I miss my Patty.

On yesterday’s ups, I had such a great run that what was supposed to be 7 ended up 9.  It was the first really cold day here, windchill 30, but it was sunny and vibrant outside and I just wanted to keep going.  Later, we went for a fun dinner with our friends Lara and Jeff where I got drunk as a skunk and ate duck.   Anyway, it was almost enough to make me forget the interval session I had planned today, but I went to bed with it weighing on my mind because it was one of those long things I hate.

Yeah, I’m on the Flo Plan which includes only VO2 sessions of my liking, but Pfitzinger has a cruel one for pre-race week (2 x 1.25 miles @5k race pace with recoveries 50%-90% of the interval time) and because it looked like something I knew I’d hate, I made myself do it.  I figure if I dread it, it must be good for me (in intervals, anyway).

It ended up being ok, I averaged 7:16 pace on the first one (9:05), recovered for 6 minutes (65%ish), than went 7:19/mi (9:09) on the second one, so 7:17/mi avg. for both.  Really not bad and now I have that amazing feeling after a hateful workout that says “I did it! I’m done! I can be a restful pig now.”

I was so cooked afterwards, that I ended up run/walking the 3 miles home, which I never do.  Even with the walking, it still ended up a regular easy pace, so no biggie, just a point of interest.

Now I’ve done my physical labor for the day, I’m going downtown in a minute to do a voiceover of some short, in-store spots.  Not sure what it’s for yet, but speaking of in-store stuff, did I ever mention how jealous I am of whoever gets those self-checkout voiceover gigs for grocery stores?  Can you imagine what a giant job that would be?  I mean, there are only about a zillion products in a store.  Plus, how fun to hear your robotic voice say “Move your.   Tree-ripe peaches.  To The Belt.”

And now.  I must.  Go.
Later.   Kids.

Today was supposed to be 5 recovery so I didn’t get out until 8:30, figuring who cares if it’s 80 degrees, I’ll be going slow.  But then I got that weird rebelliousness in me and ran it GA instead.  I was bitching at myself while doing it, so I really don’t get my motives, except to say it must be some weird confirmation thing.  Like when you bite the inside of your mouth and keep doing it to confirm that yes, it really does hurt.  Except in this case, it’s to confirm that yes, I really can run faster than a snail. Don’t know why I can’t just believe it and let it go.

But anyway, I did it like a pyramid because once I got to the middle with an MP mile, I realized I’d better pull back since I have 14 of those on Sunday.  Avg. for today’s run: 8:43.  Yeah, I know, none of the times I post are really speedy at all, but considering the pace the plan asks for, it was naughtily fast.

So tomorrow is my birthday, I’m going to be 47 years old!  How in hell did this happen?!?  The funny thing is my marathon training has overtaken so many parts of my life that I’ve requested no celebration tomorrow night, knowing that it could mess with my MP run on Sunday.

I posted something in my Women’s BQ thread along these lines also, because I have some cute chunky platform flip-flops that I’ve stopped wearing because I’m afraid I’ll slide off and hurt my ankle.  I also imagine myself tripping on the sidewalk or being run into by a bicyclist, laming me and ruining my marathon dream.  And I know my friends are tired of hearing, “no thanks, I’m going to stay in, I have a hard run tomorrow”, but it’s the sad truth, I’d rather have a great run than go out.  Then again, I’m a hermit anyway, so quite a handy excuse.

But enough imaginings from the Pre-Marathon Drama Queen, how about today’s musical pick?

I’m usually a New Music/Alternative freak but I love a great melodic theme no matter what the genre (add a great hook and I’m there).  So don’t be surprised that today’s fave tune has a Southern Rock type feel: Cocaine Cowgirl by Matt Mays.  Extraordinarily cheezy video, but it’s the only way to play you the song.  Anyway, it has this wonderful melancholy opening guitar riff that laces through the whole tune.  And besides, who doesn’t like a good druggy song every now and then?