Aug 9: When the going gets tough...

...the tough get going out their door wearing a pair of sneakers, a pocket full of GU's, and a fully charged Garmin. Now, I definitely would not call myself "tough", but I think "dumb" would be a better word used to describe me from my non-running friends. ("You did WHAT this weekend? WHY? Are you dumb?!!") At any rate, I found myself staring down the barrel of the worst (i.e. most intense) workout (to date) by Mr. Jack Daniels this morning when I got up out of bed so I did what any normal person would do - I procrastinated.

Lucky for me the Olympics are on...the perfect procrastination tool! Paris is only 5 or 6 hours behind Beijing so there were definitely a lot of live action to chose from! You know, the Olympics are a funny time of year (or funny time every 4 years) because I find myself glued to the TV watching things that I would normally channel surf over any other time. Today, for example, I was mezmorized by the 10m Air Pistol competition going on. Yep - that accounted for about 30 minutes of procrastination time! So, what is Air Pistol? I am glad you asked. It is basically a souped up version of Duck Hunter with fancier guns and more serious looking people doing it. But instead of having the little dog laugh at you if you do poorly, you are left off the podium (and I am assuming you will be left out of all those sweet, sweet endorsement deals that I am sure that these guys get!)

I am glad I toughed that out though because I got to enjoy the cycling road race afterwards. I love watching cycling, especially when it is interspersed with Judo, Rowing, and Gymnastics! So, yeah, pretty sweet procrastination! After watching all of these athletes pursue their dreams and goals I realized that my own goals were not actually any closer to becoming a reality so I strapped on the Garmin and headed out.

Now, normally I would tell you what my scheduled workout would be here. So here it is:

Long
Hard
Repeat

About a 1/2 mile away from the house I realized that I forgot to put on my Heart Rate strap (ticks me off). I gave serious consideration of running back to the apartment to get it but the thought of adding an extra mile to today's run was not met favorably. I was pretty ticked about this during my entire warmup (boy - talk about being totally anal!). By the time I started into my Threshold running my mind was onto other things! Unfortunately there is no HR graph to disect today. But, you can disect my splits below:

Warmup: 2.95 miles (7:15 min/mile)

Threshold (reported as Distance (mile 1 time, .75 mile time, TOTAL time):

1. 1.75 miles (5:56 min, 4:27 min, 10:23 min)
400m recovery (1:54 min)
2. 1.75 miles (5:55 min, 4:27 min, 10:22 min)

10 miles Easy
7:19/7:23/7:20/7:17/7:19/7:17/7:16/7:19/7:10/7:19 min/mile

Threshold
3. 2.5 miles (5:54min, 5:58min, 2:58min, 14:50min TOTAL)

Cooldown: 2.12 miles (7:18 min/mile)

TOTAL DISTANCE: 21.15 miles

Here is my pace graph.


This was my first 20+ miler of the season...me thinks I better start getting used to them!

Well, Jennie's friend is here from Calgary and I got to go give her lesson in Wii Boxing...I hope she likes the taste of leather from my gloves!

Later homies!
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