Greg's Running Blog

I don’t have a specific topic in mind for today’s post so I thought I’d just write down a bunch of the tings that have been happening and I feel might be relevant.

Yesterday was a long run day for me and I ran 8.1 miles (13 km) in an hour and 9 minutes. This was the longest run I have done to date and it was a pretty good one. I have enjoyed it greatly. I find that running gives me time to be with my thoughts alone and think about various things I wouldn’t have time to think about. I think about my family, my kids, office stuff, what I will write on this blog once I get back, stupid stuff or whatever else comes to my mind.

Long runs are meant to be easy and ran at a conversational pace. Even though I have tried it to be easy it turned out to be pretty tough due to the weather. I had to run in 45 degrees (7 C) which is actually a pretty good temperature to run in, not too hot and not too cold. What made the weather tough was the wind. We had 30+ mph (50 km/h) sustained winds with gusts up to 40+ mph (65 km/h). Running in this kind of wind can be anything but fun. Luckily the wind was blowing in my face for the most part heading out and it was behind me pushing me home on the way back. Had it been the other way around it would have sucked even more. It was like getting a second wind (no pun) for the return 4 miles. My pace certainly reflected the shift in direction; I have averaged 8:51 min/mile (5:30 min/km) on the way out and averaged 8:24 min/mile (5:13 min/km) on the way back for a total average of 8:37 min/mile (5:21 min/km) which is right smack the same as my usual easy running pace. So the wind didn’t affect my overall pace as much as I would have thought it would and it helped me produce a really nice reverse split. Reverse split is when you run the second half of a run faster than the first half.

What made the run also tough was the elevation. This particular route has 414 ft of elevation climb in it. Most of it, 250 ft, comes in the front half and the rest in the return. This, combined with the wind caused my pace to be all over the map instead of being a steady slow run. But I have concentrated on heart rate, ie. effort, instead of pace and my heart rate was pretty level throughout the run. I think I handled the run rather well and it was pretty good for my first 8 miler. I’ll be running a lot more than this later so it better feel good. I also managed to break the calorie consumption barrier with this one, I have burned 1,000 calories in the 70 minutes I was out running. That is a whole lot of fat off my tush!

So Sunday was a pretty good run and today called for an easy 3 mile (5K) recovery run. I did it in the evening as morning temperatures were freezing but by tonight the weather was really nice in the upper 60s (20 C). Today’s diet was very clean and low cal, I had brown rice, steamed veggies and canned salmon for lunch and grilled chicken for dinner. It has left me with about 400 more calories to eat after my long run. I have a good friend who I used to fight fires with while I was on the fire department. We would meet up at Whataburger and get some shakes and chat. Lately he has been very busy with work and a newborn son so we hadn’t been seeing much of each other lately. I figured with the extra 400 calories to burn I could afford to get a shake tonight. A 16 oz Kid’s Vanilla Shake is 440 calories, mostly sugar and no real nutritional value. I thought I could afford it once in a blue moon so I called him up before my run but he didn’t answer. I left him a message and went for my 3 miles.

Once I got home there was still no message from him so I thought the evening was a bust and I ate a granola bar, 190 calories and I was just about contemplating eating some bananas to bring my daily calories up to their required 1,800. That is when I got the text message from him that we’re good to go and he’d see me at Whataburger in 10. Darn! I so wished I hadn’t had that granola bar at this point! But I already ate it! What should I do?

I went to Whataburger and ordered the Kid’s shake but I also asked for an extra 16 oz cup and split the shake in half. I drank half of it and my buddy drank the other half. This made me stay within my calorie budget yet still enjoy his company and talk for 45 minutes before he had to head back home to tend to his family. I am really glad I got to see him and we got to chat just like in the good old days over some vanilla shake. The only difference was that I had half of a kid’s cup instead of a regular or large. And quite honestly I can’t tell the difference, all I remember is having great conversation and shake tonight.